The number of partial-birth abortions has tripled in the past four years, according to a report on abortion trends released this week.
An estimated 2,200 dilation and extraction, or partial-birth, abortions were conducted in 2000, said researchers with the pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute, who surveyed all known U.S. abortion facilities during the past two years. In 1996, institute researchers estimated that there had been 650 partial-birth abortions, which are performed on unborn children older than 20 weeks.
The 2,200 partial-birth abortions account for 0.17 percent of abortions, said institute researchers Lawrence Finer and Stanley Henshaw. Moreover, the 2,200 figure “should be interpreted cautiously because projections based on such small numbers are subject to error,” they wrote.
Douglas Johnson, legislative director, and Dr. Randall O'Bannon, director of education, of the National Right to Life Committee said the new number shows one of two things: “Either they vastly underreported the number in 1996 or there's been a huge increase, more than tripling partial-birth abortions in four years.”
“We think even the new number only represents a fraction of the true number,” Johnson added.
In the new study, AGI tries to minimize the significance of the 2,200 figure by saying that it amounts to only a fraction of 1% of all reported abortions. Johnson commented, “It is unbelievably callous to dismiss the killing of 2,200 mostly delivered babies as 'rare.' If a virus was killing 2,200 pre-mature infants, we'd call it an epidemic.”
Johnson noted that the survey question describes the abortion method in a way that is so confused and inaccurate that even abortionists who have performed hundreds of partial-birth abortions, as legally defined, could honestly answer that they have never performed the procedure described in the question. Secondly, responses to the AGI survey are purely voluntary, and abortionists who perform large numbers of partial-birth abortions may be disinclined to feed the national controversy by voluntarily reporting.
Partial-birth abortion is expected to be a political issue again this year, despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2000 that struck down a Nebraska ban on partial-birth abortion and chilled enforcement of dozens of similar laws in other states.
“Congress is moving to address the issue on a national basis,” Johnson said. A federal ban should pass the House, “and we hope it will pass the Senate this year.”
Abortion advocates are expecting the “same-old, same-old” from the new Congress, said Elizabeth Cavendish, legal director of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League's Pro-Choice America. Whatever Congress produces is likely to be “extreme and unconstitutional” and, like the Nebraska law, restrictive of too many abortion procedures, she said.
(This article courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email infonet@prolifeinfo.org.)”