When the Supreme Court upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2007, abortionists who had been insisting partial-birth abortions were necessary to protect women’s health instantly stopped doing them. At least, that’s what we are supposed to believe.

But the recent videos released by the Center for Medical Progress indicate that Planned Parenthood abortionists, at least, may still be engaging in this horrific practice of partially delivering and destroying an unborn child—specifically for the purpose of obtaining human organs for sale. That would be illegal. The real alternative to Planned Parenthood having violated the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act (PBABA), however, isn’t that Planned Parenthood is blameless. It’s that Planned Parenthood and its allies in the abortion industry lied to the public and to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lying to the Supreme Court

In fall 2006, the Supreme Court considered PBABA’s constitutionality. The law lacked any “health” exception, but exempts the mythical case in which a partial-birth abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life. Congress heard evidence and determined there were no cases where partial-birth abortion was medically necessary. It also knew abortionists would turn any “health” exception into an unlimited partial-birth abortion license.

Abortionists argued that approximately 2,200 partial-birth abortions per year (roughly six per day) were necessary—that particular method—for health reasons. That’s a small fraction of the more than 1 million abortions performed annually (nearly 3,000 per day). But the abortion industry fought to maintain this particularly gruesome method, insisting it was a medically necessary “last resort.”

But in April 2007 the Supreme Court held in Gonzales v. Carhart that the law was facially constitutional. The 5-4 decision allowed the restriction on this particularly gruesome abortion method to go into effect. Let’s assume the rhetoric of Planned Parenthood and its allies is true, that another abortion method could not be used in those cases. That would mean the PBABA has prevented nearly 19,000 of the most gruesome and dehumanizing abortions since the Supreme Court upheld it.

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