The website is down because someone removed the X-Box

Right here.

Stillborn

Maybe the kinds of lawyers who defend abortionists are too busy representing terrorists nowadays, but this is interesting:

Exactly one year ago today, the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Carhart rejected a facial challenge to the constitutionality of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003. Confronting “documented medical disagreement whether the Act’s prohibition [on partial-birth abortion] would ever impose significant health risks on women,” the five-justice majority ruled that such disagreement about health risks in particular circumstances did not warrant invalidating the act in its entirety. Instead, the Court virtually invited practitioners of partial-birth abortion and their allies to bring so-called as-applied challenges that would carve out from the Act’s scope any circumstances in which partial-birth abortion might be shown to be necessary to preserve the mother’s health. (See my essay “The Face-Off Over Partial-Birth Abortion” for a fuller discussion of the distinction between facial and as-applied challenges.)

In dissent, Justice Ginsburg predicted that these as-applied challenges would “be mounted swiftly, to ward off serious, sometimes irremediable harm, to women whose health would be endangered by the [Act’s] prohibition.” According to Ginsburg, “the record already includes hundreds and hundreds of pages of testimony identifying ‘discrete and well-defined instances’ in which recourse to an intact D&E [i.e., partial-birth abortion] would better protect the health of women with particular conditions.”

So how many as-applied challenges have been filed over the past year? Zero.

In short, they've got nothing, and at last they're outed.

No, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't appreciate the full ramifications of the above. Nor do I appreciate how big a burden has been placed on those who would show that partial birth abortions offer unique medical benefits - maybe that's the real issue.

And no, I'm not a physician either. But just how much medicine do you need to know that creating a situation you would ordinarily avoid (delivering the baby feet first) and stopping delivery of the live baby after all but its head is outside the birth canal would somehow help the health of the mother? If the idea was to avoid labor, just what has she missed?

And how much law do you need to know to condemn someone who, given a choice between moving the baby another few inches outside the womb or choosing to kill it, opts for the latter?

Aside: did anyone ever go to med school intending to become an abortionist?

UN priorities

U.N. racism investigator to visit U.S. from Monday

I wonder if they investigate anti-Semitism? Being the UN, if they did, they'd only do it in Israel.