Newest Victim of Partial Birth Abortion: Rev. Dobson

I have apparently been living in a cave for me to have totally missed this. My excuse is that pro-lifers pay more attention to these things than us pro-choicers.

Bottom line, apparently, the Court's decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion will have no actual effect on late-terms abortions. And this pisses off a lot of pro-lifers. So much so that they are turning on their leaders who have lauded the decision. Mahablog explains better than I.

After the Supreme Court upheld the “partial birth” abortion ban in April I wrote a couple of posts (”Late-Term Confusion” and “More Late-Term Confusion“) about how the Fetus People celebrating the end of “late-term abortion” had been seriously misled. I predicted the FPs would be in for a shock when they realized what the decision was really about, and that it did not “save” any “babies” at all.

Well, that day has arrived. Some in the rank-and-file of the movement to criminalize abortion have realized they’ve been had. And in a messy attempt at damage control, a spokesperson for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family explained that the “partial birth” ban would stop some abortions, because the alternative procedures are more dangerous to women. Which is what we pro-choicers have been saying all along.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave …

Alan Cooperman writes in today’s Washington Post:

In an open letter to Dobson that was published as a full-page ad May 23 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, Focus on the Family’s hometown newspaper, and May 30 in the Washington Times, the heads of five small but vocal groups called the Carhart decision “wicked,” and accused Dobson of misleading Christians by applauding it.

Carhart is even “more wicked than Roe” because it is “not a ban, but a partial-birth abortion manual” that affirms the legality of late-term abortions “as long as you follow its guidelines,” the ads said. “Yet, for many years you have misled the Body of Christ about the ban, and now about the ruling itself.”

Brian Rohrbough, president of Colorado Right to Life and a signer of the ads, said:

“All you have to do is read the ruling, and you will find that this will never save a single child, because even though the justices say this one technique is mostly banned — not completely banned — there are lots of other techniques, and they even encourage abortionists to find less shocking means to kill late-term babies,” he said.

Another signer, the Rev. Bob Enyart, a Christian talk radio host and pastor of the Denver Bible Church, said the real issue is fundraising.

“Over the past seven years, the partial-birth abortion ban as a fundraising technique has brought in over a quarter of a billion dollars” for major antiabortion groups, “but the ban has no authority to prevent a single abortion, and pro-life donors were never told that,” he said. “That’s why we call it the pro-life industry.”

In Rohrbough’s view, partisan politics is also involved.

“What happened in the abortion world is that groups like National Right to Life, they’re really a wing of the Republican Party, and they’re not geared to push for personhood for an unborn child — they’re geared to getting Republicans elected,” he said. “So we’re seeing these ridiculous laws like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban put forward, and then we’re deceived about what they really do.”
...

The faithful had been coaxed into believing that “partial birth” abortion was a synonym for “late-term” abortion, and that by banning “PBA” they would save viable “babies” from being killed by their mothers. Without PBA, they thought, women had no alternative but live birth.

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[A]fter the Carhart decision was handed down many rightie bloggers declared that women in their third trimester would no longer be able to waltz into an abortion clinic and get their babies killed as easily as getting a bikini wax. This assumption revealed a gross ignorance of the issue, both medically and legally.

As explained in the two “confusion” posts linked above, elective late-term abortions were already illegal. The Roe v. Wade decision provided that states could ban elective abortions when the fetus has been gestating long enough that it might be viable, a stage reached very late in the second trimester. Most states have passed laws that prohibit abortions after that point except where a physician decides there is a real medical need.

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Further, there are other ways to perform mid- and late-term abortions that the “PBA” law does not ban. The justices of the Supreme Court discussed these other procedures in their deliberations on Carhart. None of these other procedures were secret. You can learn all about them with a few minutes of googling. But apparently true believers like Brian Rohrbough were in the dark about this until he read the Carhart deliberations and decision.

Thus, to some people, Carhart is “not a ban, but a partial-birth abortion manual.” It explains procedures they didn’t know about, but in fact have been the more common procedures used in mid- and late-term abortions for many years. And the laws about how late in pregnancy an abortion may be performed have not changed.

(If any Fetus People are reading this, let me say that I’ve been trying to explain this to you meatheads for years. Many’s the time I attempted to explain that your beloved “partial birth” bills would, in effect, ban no abortions at all. And for my trouble I was called a lying baby killer. Listen to me next time, OK?)

Here’s where it gets cute (emphasis added):

A Focus on the Family spokesman said that Dobson would not comment. But the organization’s vice president, Tom Minnery, said that Dobson rejoiced over the ruling “because we, and most pro-lifers, are sophisticated enough to know we’re not going to win a total victory all at once. We’re going to win piece by piece.”