Two federal appeals courts ruled the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional because it does not include an exception for women whose lives are endangered by their pregnancies. This is a signal of hope that not everyone in the federal government is a puppet of the far right, and that some people in positions of power actually know something about the subjects they address, instead of issuing knee-jerk decisions made for them by the Christian right.

An exception for the health of women in the Partial Birth Aboriton Ban Act would effectively make the law superfluous. Late-term abortions are not done lightly; they are extremely rare, and performed when continuing a pregancy would endanger the potential mother’s health. The only other circumstance in which the procedure is used is when the fetus is too deformed to survive its own birth; banning the abortion of such a fetus is pointless for the fetus and only traumatic for the mother. The misleadingly-named Act–which does not involve birth at all, partial or otherwise–supposedly exists to protect life, yet it only endangers the lives of women who would have given birth to surviving children if they had the choice.

Some opponents of late-term abortion call it cruel and uncivilized, and even compare it to infanticide. These critics don’t understand the conditions of the operation. Judge Chester J. Straub highlighted this when he described the fetus in a late-term abortion as “a child in the process of being born.” He, like many others, is deliberately misled by the erroneous term “partial birth.” Others feel that the operation is “gruesome, brutal, barbaric, and uncivilized;” people might feel the same way about splitting someone’s skull open and cutting out pieces of grey matter while the patient is still conscious and talking, yet no one complains about life-saving brain surgery.

Some judges and employees of the Justice Department even claim that late-term abortion is never necessary to save a woman’s life, but have never presented any testimony or evidence to refute the medical fact that it is often the difference between life and death for the mother. Claims that a fetus aborted after twenty-four weeks of gestation can feel pain have the possibility of being true, but the fact that women feel pain, especially while dying in childbirth, is common knowledge. Although a fetus’ nerves can create pain signals, the connections in central nervous system that are necessary to process these signals do not finish forming until after birth.

The question of when a fetus becomes a human being has never been answered. It remains a grey area that can only be decided by the individual; the First Amendment was created to protect the rights of individuals to make such personal decisions for themselves. Even when the First Amendment is ignored, the science will show anyone who cares to take an honest look that banning late-term abortion would be a medical mistake.