ANN ARBOR, MI — The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has submitted a brief with the United States Supreme Court supporting the Federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Joining the Thomas More Law Center in the friend of the court brief are the Catholic League and the National Pro-Life Alliance.

The appeal to the Supreme Court involves a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Nebraska that found the federal Act to be unconstitutional. Two other federal courts of appeal, the Second Circuit in New York and the Ninth Circuit in California, have also ruled the Act unconstitutional.

The Act bans the abortion procedure wherein an unborn baby, generally 20 weeks or longer in gestation, is removed from her mother’s womb, except for the head. The doctor punctures the child’s head, sucks out the child’s brains in order to collapse the skull, and then removes the dead child from the mother.

According to Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Law Center, "Partial-birth abortion is nothing other than infanticide, and this barbaric procedure must be stopped."

In the brief, the Law Center exposes the rhetoric of the pro-abortion movement, which is designed to distract the public and the courts from the reality that each time an abortion is performed, a human life is destroyed. As medical science demonstrates, life begins at the moment of conception, and abortion advocates have tried to blur this reality in an attempt to sedate the public into believing that the atrocity of abortion is acceptable.

Edward L. White III, trial counsel with the Thomas More Law Center, explained, "In our brief, we request that the Supreme Court find the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 to be constitutional. We also request that the Supreme Court take this opportunity to reconsider and reject its 'abortion rights' decisions, such as Roe v. Wade. The time has come for the Supreme Court to stop the grave injustices that have resulted from those decisions."

The Thomas More Law Center is currently involved in several other pro-life initiatives, including defending the State of Michigan's statute banning partial-birth abortions, and a petition drive for a Michigan constitutional amendment that defines a person as existing from the moment of conception and thus protected by Michigan's Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Thomas More Law Center was also involved in the 2004 South Dakota attempt to criminalize abortions and directly confront Roe v. Wade, an attempt that lost by one vote in the South Dakota legislature.


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