FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2003 WWW.USDOJ.GOV CIV (202) 514-2007 TDD (202) 514-1888 As part of our vigorous effort to defend the partial birth abortion ban, the Justice Department today requested that the court in the Southern District of New York set a date for a combined preliminary injunction hearing and hearing on the merits of the law within 120 days. Congress has said that partial birth abortion is a gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary... and the President concluded that our nation must ban it in order to protect innocent new life. The best way to fulfill these important obligations is to work quickly to compile the strong record of the truth behind partial birth abortion and to seek court review on the full record at the earliest possible time. Specific findings of Congress: Congress found that a moral, medical, and ethical consensus exists that the practice of performing a partial-birth abortion... is a gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited. See Act, § 2(1). Congress determined that [r]ather than being an abortion procedure that is embraced by the medical community, particularly among physicians who routinely perform other abortion procedures, partial-birth abortion remains a disfavored procedure that is not only unnecessary to preserve the health of the mother, but in fact poses serious risks to the long-term health of women and in some circumstances, their lives. See Act, § 2(2).
Congress also found that partial-birth abortion confuses the medical, legal, and ethical duties of physicians to preserve and promote life, as the physician acts directly against the physical life of a child, whom he or she had just delivered, all but the head, out of the womb, in order to end that life. Congress also found, Partial-birth abortion thus appropriates the terminology and techniques used by obstetricians in the delivery of living children - obstetricians who preserve and protect the life of the mother and the child - and instead uses those techniques to end the life of the partially-born child. See Act, § 2(14)(J).
[U]nborn infants at this stage can feel pain when subjected to painful stimuli and that their perception of this pain is even more intense than that of newborn infants and older children when subjected to the same stimuli. Thus, during a partial-birth abortion procedure, the child will fully experience the pain associated with piercing his or her skull and sucking out his or her brain. See Act, § 2(14)(M).
Congress concluded that the gruesome and inhumane nature of the partial-birth abortion procedure and its disturbing similarity to the killing of a newborn infant promotes a complete disregard for infant human life that can only be countered by a prohibition of the procedure. See Act, § 2(14)(L). 03-614
Source: US Department of Justice
