Is It Really a Partial Birth? You Don't Need a Weatherman (to know which way the Greenhouse gases blow).

This essay originally appeared on National Review Online, November 8, 2006

Last June, Linda Greenhouse, who has covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times for most of the last 28 years, took time out to receive an honor at Harvard. According to a later report about her speech on National Public Radio, Greenhouse lamented, among other discouraging developments, what she called a "sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism." She added, "To say that these last few years have been dispiriting is an understatement."

Trooper that she is, however, Greenhouse is back on the front lines at the Supreme Court with a commentary in the Times's Sunday, November 5, "Week in Review" section about the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, on which the Court heard oral arguments November 8.

There are several points in Greenhouse's essay that are worthy of careful analysis, but here I will focus on just one: Her attempt to discredit the idea that human babies are really being mostly delivered alive before they are killed. It seems that Greenhouse recognizes that this notion bothers a lot of peopleincluding even many people who, for some reason, are not so troubled by other types of abortions.

Greenhouse quotes, from a legal brief, a characterization of the partial-birth-abortion method as "killing a child in the birth process." She then comments, "While this description is true in the sense that uninterrupted gestation leads to birth'He not busy being born is busy dying,' in the words of the Bob Dylan songit is well off the mark as a description of what actually occurs."

But off the mark in what way? Greenhouse offers only one statement in support of her "off the mark" declarationa quote from abortionist Warren M. Hern, who explains that he (among others) kills a fetus by injecting a lethal drug into the womb and then removing the cadaver a day or two later. "The cognitive construct of the law has nothing to do with current medical practice," Hern said.

All that demonstrates, however, is that Hern is not performing partial-birth abortions. That is not terribly surprising, since Hern once told American Medical News that he did not employ the method because of safety concerns: "I have very serious reservations about this procedure. ... You really can't defend it. I'm not going to tell somebody else that they should not do this procedure. But I'm not going to do it."