As Justice Kennedy has described this method of ending a pregnancy, dismemberment abortion “requires the abortionist to use instruments to grasp a portion (such as a foot or hand) of a developed and living fetus and drag the grasped portion out of the uterus into the vagina.”7 Id. at 958, 120 S. Ct. at 2624. The practitioner then “uses the traction created by the opening between the uterus and vagina to dismember the fetus, tearing the grasped portion away from the remainder of the body.” Id. That is not the result of any sadistic impulses of the practitioner but instead is part and parcel of the method. See id. One practitioner explained:
The traction between the uterus and vagina is essential to the procedure because attempting to abort a fetus without using that traction is [like] “pulling the cat’s tail” or “drag[ging] a string across the floor, you’ll just keep dragging it. It’s not until something grabs the other end that you are going to develop traction.”
Id.
In this type of abortion the unborn child dies the way anyone else would if
dismembered alive. “It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb.” Id. at 958–59, 120 S. Ct. at 2624. It can, however, “survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.” Id. at 959, 120 S. Ct. at 2624. The plaintiff practitioner in the Stenberg case testified that using ultrasound he had observed a heartbeat even with “extensive parts of the fetus removed.” Id. But the heartbeat cannot last. At the end of the abortion — after the larger pieces of the unborn child have been torn off with forceps and the remaining pieces sucked out with a vacuum — the “abortionist is left with ‘a tray full of pieces.’” Id. It is no wonder that Justice Ginsburg has described this method of abortion as “gruesome” and “brutal.” Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 182, 127 S. Ct. at 1647 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (comparing this method to partial birth abortion and stating that this one “could equally be characterized as brutal, involving as it does tearing a fetus apart and ripping off its limbs,” describing it as “equally gruesome,” and arguing that it is no less “akin to infanticide” than partial birth abortion) (quotation marks omitted).