Gruesome Partial Birth Abortion Procedure is officially a crime.

We have taken a baby step back from our national insanity. The next step should be an effort to end all late term abortions.

In this afternoon's Wall Street Journal Electronic Report the following appeared:
THE AFTERNOON REPORT (IN FULL)An Abortion MilepostBy TIM ANNETTHanding a major victory to abortion opponents, a divided Supreme Court ruledthat a nationwide ban on so-called partial-birth abortions doesn't violate the constitutional rights of women.Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the court's majority opinion that opponents of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 "have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases." The 5-4 ruling broke neatly along the court's ideological faultlines, as President Bush's two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, joined Justices Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The ruling was the first time thatthe high court had upheld a ban on a specific abortion procedure. Other abortionbattles before the Supreme Court, including the landmark Roe v. Wade case, havecentered on the question of whether, not how, a woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy. Three federal appeals courts struck down the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, finding that it violated a 5-4 Supreme Court opinion in 2000 that invalidated a similar Nebraska law because it made no exception to preserve a woman's health. The ban was signed by President Bush after two previous bills passed by a Republican-controlled Congress were vetoed by President Clinton.Government lawyers had argued that the federal ban had avoided the flaws of the Nebraska law by officially finding that the procedure, which involves removing the fetus intact, was never medically necessary and by defining the procedure itself in a precise fashion. Solicitor General Paul Clement maintained that the2003 law renders a clear distinction between legal abortions, where the fetal demise is induced in the uterus, and those where the procedure takes place "when the living fetus is over halfway outside of the womb." He argued that since safer alternatives were in place, the ban wouldn't deter abortion, merely end what opponents call a grisly practice. But advocates say the procedure is sometimes the safest for a woman seeking to end a pregnancy and that upholding the ban would effectively threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.Of the more than one million abortions that are performed in the U.S. each year,more than nine in 10 take place in the first 12 weeks.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing in dissent, called the decision "alarming"and said that it "refuses to take ... seriously" previous Supreme Court decisions on the abortion issue. She wrote that the decision "tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists." Before the ruling, proponents on both sides of the issue appeared to agree that even though the procedure accounts for only a small proportion of abortions, it may lead to broader curbs. But voters have recently rebuffed other measures to limit abortion. Arguments in the case last November took place just days after voters in three states rejected ballot measures to restrict abortions. Voters in California and Oregon rejected measures requiring parental notification before pregnant minors could obtain abortions, while South Dakotans repealed a law that banned all abortions except when the woman's life is in jeopardy.