Unborn baby (Screenshot)

The ACLU has spent so much time in Kentucky over the last two years, it ought to relocate! For the third time, the extremist group is suing the state for doing what voters want: outlawing a violent form of abortion after 11 weeks. “Once again,” an ACLU spokeswoman writes, “the Kentucky General Assembly passed a bill that limits abortion access and, once again, Gov. Matt Bevin signed it into law... . This restriction,” she says, "is part of a national strategy to push abortion out of reach.” You bet it is!

The dismemberment abortion, or dilation and evacuation, is like something out of a horror movie. It is, as John Daniel Davidson writes, “exactly what it sounds like: a doctor uses forceps to tear apart a live fetus, limb by limb, and remove it from the mother's uterus. This is usually done in the second trimester, when the fetus is too large to be suctioned out.” And, from what scientists know now, at a time when most babies feel pain. Pro-abortion camps call it simply “D&E,” hoping the two small initials will help cover up the barbaric procedure it represents. Kentucky, like a growing number of other states, isn't fooled.

As one doctor explained in an emotional testimony about this kind of procedure in Texas, he couldn't stomach doing D&Es after he lost his five-year-old daughter in a car accident. At the start of a dismemberment abortion – the same one the ACLU insists is “safe” (no one is quite sure for whom) – he pulled out the first body part and stopped.

“I didn't want to continue,” he said. “But I had to because you can't leave any body parts in the woman. We don't pile up body parts on the table to be gruesome, we do it to keep inventory. If we don't get all the parts out, the woman will get sick, get an infection, she could even die.” When he looked at the stack of miniature body parts he'd just removed, “I didn't see the woman's right to choose or the $800 cash I'd made in 15 minutes. I saw somebody's son or daughter.”

Now, groups like the ACLU are so determined to protect abortion that they can't even stop and recognize the brutality of it all. Fortunately, the abortion militants who agree are a rapidly shrinking bunch. Most Americans agree with the common-sense limits on abortion, even if they're self-identified “pro-choicers.”

Maybe that's what has helped drive movements in Tennessee, where Governor Bill Haslam (R), just signed a bill into law defunding the organization that defends this kind of abortion. Thanks to the state legislature, Planned Parenthood will no longer rake in $1 million a year from Tennessee taxpayers. They've also made sure, through their Title X Prioritization Act, that real health centers – not abortion facilities – move to the front of the line for “family planning” money.

In Rhode Island, the shift over abortion is so palpable that even Democrats are crossing party lines to stop it. Even there, in a deeply blue state, five Democrats sponsored a dismemberment ban. And while the bill didn't get a vote, it's a good reminder that cutting up children in the womb isn't – and should never be – a partisan issue.

Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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