grisly blowback

yesterday c-span covered a discussion at the national press club on partial birth abortion. panelists from both sides of the debate dealt more fully with the range of relevant issues than i've heard done before in a public forum, including a woman's health, definition of a person, distinction between medical options, and judicial opinions.

no conclusion was reached, and i can't sum up the arguments, but i think i gained better grasp of the controversy.

a factor that arouses much passion is that the procedure, generally said to be intact d & e (dilatation and evacuation), is often described as "grisly."

as i understand it, intact d & e is performed mainly when a fetus has a condition—hydrocephalic hypertrophy—that compresses its brain and greatly enlarges its head, preventing normal birth.

both terms—"partial birth abortion" and "intact d & e"—appear to come from details of the procedure, which removes most of a fetus from a womb alive and unharmed before penetrating its skull with a surgical instrument (thus causing death) to drain out fluid in order to complete the extraction. (where does "dilatation" come into it? i assume it refers to opening a cervix, possibly using a drug and/or traction.)

i'm not sure what's more grisly about it than, say, open-heart surgery—which can get fairly bloody and sometimes gets done to young children—but i'll guess lethal penetration of the skull sounds gruesome.

6 years ago justice kennedy wrote in a dissenting opinion that when a fetus is taken out of a womb alive it becomes a person, which gives its life constitutional protection. since the composition of the supreme court has changed, his opinion could decide the next case on the issue.

if intact d & e then gets criminalized, surgeons might avoid prosecution by resorting to a type of d & e that risks permanently injuring a woman by dismembering a fetus inside her womb and extracting it piece by piece.

talk about GRISLY!