Too Liberal

Appeals Court Voids Ban on 'Partial Birth' Abortions - New York Times: "The law forbids a method of abortion that has been infrequently used, in rare or unexpected complications of pregnancy mainly in the second or third trimester. Sometimes called D and X, for dilation and extraction, it entails partly extracting an intact fetus from a woman's uterus and killing it by collapsing and removing the brain from the skull so that the fetus can pass through the birth canal. Opponents of abortion refer to the method as partial-birth abortion and denounce it as brutal and uncivilized. Opponents of the law, on the other hand, do not primarily defend the procedure itself, but attack the measure on the ground that it curtails a larger right to abortion."

No matter how you feel on the overall issue of abortion, this practice is clearly murder. Most babies at this stage can today be SAVED by modern science and instead we murder them. Thankfully, the procedure is rare... This was overturned because it didn't make an exception for a mother's "health" (although it did for her life). So how do you define health? The very term seems ripe for abuse to me. Unless we can narrow it down to a range of serious circumstances (paralysis, not some bogus psychological thing that could be faked), this is absolutely atrocious. We're practically saying, "Yes, go forth and decapitate your infant, for it is just and neccessary." It'll now turn to the Supreme Court, and in this circumstance, I hope Bush DOES appoint a conservative judge.

Will these types of issues ever be decided? Probably not. But we can widdle away at the areas where one side is clearly overstepping moral boundaries, whether it be overasserting their authority (banning condoms) or remaining too much in the arena of the self (allowing this practice to perpetuate). The rest is, admittedly, quite gray and it's almost impossible to develop a firm set of rules and standards.