The Executive Director of Planned Parenthood in Lincoln, Christine Funk, was not impressed or surprised. The debate is engaged. A partial birth abortion is a procedure where the fetus is deliberately delivered feet first. When only the head remains in the woman, the doctor empties the skull of the fetus, easing the delivery of the now dead fetus through the birth canal. The importance of the debate is that it is taking place at all.
Abortion is a complex issue.
Competing rights need to be balanced and we need to decide what we mean by a person. Such deliberations need to be undertaken by legislatures rather than the judiciary. By temperament, Americans acknowledge the moral authority of decisions arrived at by legislative consensus and find it more difficult to acquiesce to fiats of any kind. The Founders rightly believed that the worst political outcome is tyranny and the most likely source of tyranny is the tyranny of the majority. To mitigate against this possibility, the Constitution divides powers among the various branches of government.