ERLC, others ask court to uphold partial birth ban
- Dec 15, 2004 - comment
The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and other pro-life organizations have urged a federal appeals court to overturn a judge’s ruling against the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act.
The ERLC and six other organizations signed onto a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Christian Legal Society with the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals seeking affirmation of the 2003 law. In September, federal judge Richard Kopf of Lincoln, Neb., struck down the measure, which bans an abortion procedure performed on a nearly totally delivered unborn child.
Kopf was the last of three federal judges to invalidate the ban. Judges in San Francisco and New York City ruled during the summer the law was unconstitutional. The Department of Justice has appealed the rulings. The cases appear destined to converge at the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The American people clearly find the heinous, barbarous procedure known as partial-birth abortion repugnant and have stated overwhelmingly they want it terminated in this country,” ERLC President Richard Land said. “Once again, the court system, which seems to think it is above the will of the people, has chosen to strike down a law passed by a significant majority of the nation’s elected representatives.
“I hope and pray that the Eighth Circuit will overturn this egregious decision,” Land said. “If not, we will continue the fight to take our government back from the imperial judiciary and once again establish government of the people, by the people and for the people instead of government of the judges, by the judges and for the judges.”
President Bush signed the ban into law last November after Congress sought for eight years to enact such a measure. Congress twice adopted bans in the 1990s only to have President Clinton veto them. After Bush signed the bill, abortion rights organizations quickly challenged the law in three courts and blocked its enforcement.
The measure bars a procedure in which a doctor delivers an intact baby, feet first, until only the head is left in the birth canal. The doctor pierces the base of the infant’s skull with surgical scissors, then inserts a catheter into the opening and suctions out the brain. The technique, which provides for easier removal of the baby’s head, normally occurs in the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy.
In the brief filed Dec. 8 with the appeals court in St. Louis, the ERLC and its pro-life allies argue Kopf erred in concluding a health exception for a mother is necessary in the prohibition and in determining the ban unduly burdened the right to abortion because it could affect another procedure.
In addition to the ERLC and CLS, others signing onto the brief were the Alliance Defense Fund, Christian Medical Association, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and National Association of Evangelicals.