BAN PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION

Sponsors:  Sen. Maltese / A. Manning

Bill # S.1868 / # A.6433

This bill, supported by NYSRTL, would ban abortions in which "the person performing the abortion deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother," and then kills the baby. Persons who violate the law would be subject to criminal penalties, but no penalty could be applied to the woman who obtained such an abortion.

Partial-birth abortion is a reprehensible procedure clearly akin to legal infanticide. The procedure is generally performed in the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy, but can be used in the third trimester of pregnancy through birth.

The physician who developed the partial birth abortion method, Dr. Martin Haskell, has acknowledged that the large majority of these procedures - 80% by his estimation - are "purely elective" performed on healthy mothers carrying healthy babies.

The late Dr. William Rashbaum, former New York professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Cornell School of Medicine and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, readily admitted that he and his colleagues performed the procedure "routinely since 1979."  Cruel to be Kind, the story of Dr. Rashbaum, noted he had performed over 21,000 abortions during his career.  Rashbaum once did 25 second trimester abortions in a single day.

Although the exact number of partial-birth abortions performed each year is unknown, Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, has estimated a national figure of between 3,000 and 5,000 annually.  Strong majorities of New Yorkers and Americans favor a ban on partial-birth abortions. This devastating procedure cannot be justified and must be outlawed.

The federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, a bill signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 5, 2003, has been blocked from enforcement.  On February 21, 2006, the United States Supreme Court announced that it will review the lower-court ruling during its next term, which begins in October, 2006.