Looking Ahead To President Bush's Second Term; Pro-Life Response to Roe: Federal Legislation; Evidence Mounts; Abortion is Excruciatingly Painful to Unborn Children.

Editor's note. The long, intense debate over banning the gruesome partial-birth abortion technique educated the entire nation. The sharp educational curve continued at three trials initiated by pro-abortion litigants. The testimony brought before the American public in a dramatic fashion the issue of the incredible pain unborn children experience in an abortion. As noted below, Congressman Smith and Senator Sam Brownback (R-Ks.), joined by many cosponsors, have introduced the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act.

While the judicial hearings on the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban only began last year, the trials are already taking their rightful place as a key part of human rights history. The details they uncovered shocked the public and spawned new pro-life legislation called the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. The trials exposed the excruciating pain unborn babies experience every day when their lives are violently snuffed out by abortion, and the whole country has now been made aware of their anguish.

Some of the most powerful testimony on the violence of partial-birth abortion, and the coldness of those who commit it, came from New York, where Judge Richard C. Casey did not allow euphemisms to be used in place of plain descriptions of what actually happens in an abortion. On March 31, an abortionist testified,

Abortionist: "What they did, they delivered the fetus intact until the head was lodged in the cervix. Then they reached up and crushed it. They used forceps to crush the skull."

Judge Casey: "Like a cracker that they use to crack a lobster shell?"

Abortionist: "Like an end of tongs you use to pick up a salad, except they are thick enough and heavy enough to crush the skull."

Judge Casey: "Except in this case you are not picking up a salad, you are crushing a baby's skull. The fetus is still alive at this point?"