God and man at Bay.(on the right)(abortion)

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 7

THE bill proscribing partial-birth abortions threw off lights, intended and not intended. There was the decision by the White House to give the signing of the new law maximum attention. Accordingly, leading lights in the pro-life legions were there to witness the act. By obvious prearrangement, four abortionists in Lincoln, Neb., were lined up ready to petition a federal court, which granted their petition as soon as the new legislation was signed. However, the Nebraskan judge's injunction applied only to the four petitioners. It took a New York judge another day to hand down an injunction that may apply nationwide.

But the point of it was clear, that the armies of the day and of the night are engaged for one more struggle.

The friends of abortion have this time around a more difficult front to move on. It used to be relatively simple: A woman has the right to abort, or doesn't have the right. We know that such a right exists. It was procreated by the Supreme Court in 1973. But the court did not authorize abortion at the near end of fetal life, and the concentration this time around has been on abortion of a fetal substance which was seconds away from becoming an infant child, but found a guillotine in its way.

The approach of pro-choice people is to declare that any limitation on the right to abort threatens the very life of that right. And to add specifically that the act just passed fails to take into account the medical needs of the mother, and for that reason alone is defective.

Defenders of the act will argue that the language of Roe v. Wade does not exclude such protections as are now offered against third-trimester carnage. And of course it is somewhere between hard and impossible to make the case that the mother's health depends on abortion at that stage. Arguments to the contrary depend on psychological readings of the mother's medical needs. Congressional argument agreed that there was simply no evidence that prospective mothers could not handle the birth of the child they had already ...