Quote of note:

The procedure was known among practitioners as "dilation and extraction." Anti-abortion groups renamed it "partial-birth abortion," a term that was not scientific, accurate or even coherent. They sought to blur the distinction between abortion and infanticide by making the procedure sound like an interrupted birth when, in fact, it was a second-trimester abortion. In short, the ban was conceived as a public relations tool. Even some right-to-lifers complain that it's just for show.

June 4, 2004

Leaders of the anti-abortion movement are up in arms over this week's ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, signed into law by President Bush last fall, is unconstitutional.

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said the ruling reflected the judge's "deep personal hostility to the law." [P6: while the distortion and manipulation of language (D and E vs "partial birth") shows Conservative deep and personal hostility to truth, much less the law of the land] Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said it showed how judges "impose their philosophies on judicial proceedings." [P6: Only progressive judges, though. Conservative judges would NEVER impose their philosophies on judicial proceedings] The White House announced that Bush would defend the ban in order to build a "culture of life." [P6: if he wants a "culture of life" he should check that cheese sandwich he left on the nightstand]

Parts of the opinion by U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton do suggest bias. But it is not one judge's hostility or philosophy that imperils the partial-birth ban as it heads toward the U.S. Supreme Court. It is the hostility and philosophy of the ban's own advocates, whose determination to moralize the language of the debate and to build a "culture of life" makes their legislation medically confusing and resistant to judicial line-drawing. They are an army of crusaders lost in a war of legal argument.