(WARNING: this blog post and video include a medical description of partial-birth abortion.)

On April 18, 2007, the Supreme Court officially upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in Gonzales v Carhart. With this decision, the law went into effect and partial-birth abortion was ban across the entire country.

The campaign to end partial-birth abortion began in 1992. That year Dr. Martin Haskell presented a paper to the National Abortion Federation on a form of late-term abortion called intact dilation and extraction or D&X. D&X is a gruesome form of abortion that involves removing the baby from the uterus feet first until only his/her head remains inside of the mother. Then his/her skull is punctured and using a catheter, his/her brain is sucked out, then the rest of the baby is removed.

The National Right to Life Committee obtained Dr. Haskell’s paper and began to publicize it in 1993. Shock and disgust over the procedure galvanized Americans to put a stop to the barbaric practice. From this moment until 2007, pro-life activists fought tirelessly to make the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act into law.

Two years later in 1995, Representative Charles Canady (R-FL) introduces a bill in the House of Representatives called the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act to prohibit D&X, partial birth abortion, from being committed. After a long and difficult battle, the Act was signed into law by President Bush in 2003 and finally went into effect after the Supreme Court upheld the law in 2007.

Twelve years later, on April 18, 2019, we spoke with the National Right to Life Committee Director of State Legislation, Ingrid Duran, about what it took to stop partial-birth abortion in the United States.