ABSTRACT
"Partial birth" abortions are unsettling even to read about--the only version of abortion in which fetuses, either viable or near viability, are partly visible outside the body while alive and inches away from birth before being dispatched. They are typically performed at 20 to 24 weeks, but sometimes later. The fetus is manipulated so that its feet and sometimes part of its body are outside the mother. The head is left in the uterus. Then the skull is pierced and the brain is suctioned out, causing skull collapse and death. Pro-choicers who defend it reflexively because it may lead to other legislation are in the exact position of gun lobbyists who shoot down bans on assault weapons because those bans may one day lead to a round-up of everybody's handguns. It a refusal, on tactical grounds, to confront the moral issue involved. More of the abstract hardness that Wolfe writes about.
