My American Law module continues to, in equal parts, fascinate and depress me.

Before I go any further with this post however, I should warn you that if the subject of abortion causes you discomfort, DO NOT read this post.

We're on the topic of abortion rights in American Law, as it were, so for the whole day today, I've been reading this case which happened in 2000, Stenberg vs. Carhart; a case in which Leroy Carhart, a Nebraska physician who performs abortions, filed a suit claiming that the Nebraska law which banned partial birth abortion was unconstitutional because it infringed on a woman's freedom and right to choose to have an abortion.

So in the laying out of some of the basic facts, you get some squeamish stuff, such as the definition of a partial birth abortion, and then some descriptions of the procedure itself, which is also called "dilation and evacuation" (D&E) or "dilation and extraction" (D&X); the latter is the name for the D&E procedure when the foetus is removed feet first. Although I really don't see a difference.

And here's how the procedure's described:

"...intact D&E proceeds in one of two ways, depending on the presentation of the fetus. If the fetus presents head first (a vertex presentation), the doctor collapses the skull; and the doctor then extracts the entire fetus through the cervix. If the fetus presents feet first (a breech presentation), the doctor pulls the fetal body through the cervix, collapses the skull, and extracts the fetus through the cervix."

My toes were squirming a little unhappily by the end of that paragraph.

And then the next one went into even further detail.


"...American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists describes the D&X procedure in a manner corresponding to a breech-conversion intact D&E, including the following steps:

'1. deliberate dilatation of the cervix, usually over a sequence of days;

'2. instrumental conversion of the fetus to a footling breech;

'3. breech extraction of the body excepting the head; and

'4. partial evacuation of the intracranial contents of a living fetus to effect vaginal delivery of a dead but otherwise intact fetus.'"


It reminds me most unpleasantly of a talk which the Secondary 4s were given in my time, during one of our pastoral care lessons; an abortion talk, of course, during which we were shown a video on abortion (and the gruesome results of it) and some diagrams of how abortions were carried out.

Other than the method which removes the less-than-3-month-old foetuses by vacuuming them out of the uterus, the one other method which I distinctly remember is the partial-birth one. Basically, in a diagram, we were shown the above procedure which I just copied and pasted above. The abortionist manipulates the foetus into a feet-first presentation (if that isn't already the case), delivers the foetus up till only its head is still inside the mother's body, then uses something to puncture the base of the foetus' skull and drain some of the contents before delivering the rest of the foetus, intact but dead.

I'm not sure what kind of effect reading stuff like this might have on most people, but I imagine that it should be quite disturbing. Probably more so for girls, considering that the cervix, uterus, etc. which is mentioned so often in the text I'm reading is the equipment which we all have, and the thought of someone or some foreign object messing around in it is just... very unsettling.

If there are women out there who specialise in abortion law (if there's such a thing, specialising in a particular kind of law), I have no idea how you read stuff like this on a daily basis.

I'm not even halfway through the case reading yet.