The first sentence of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 is a lie. It's also an appalling run-on sentence, but we won't get into that. The Act, signed into law by President Bush in 2003; challenged and struck down by three separate federal judges in 2003 and 2004; and now, amazingly, making its way onto the Supreme Court docket for November 8; starts like this:

A moral, medical, and ethical consensus exists that the practice of performing a partial-birth abortion – an abortion in which a physician deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living, unborn child's body until either the entire baby's head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the baby's trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother and only the head remains inside the womb, for the purpose of performing an overt act (usually the puncturing of the back of the child's skull and removing the baby's brains) that the person knows will kill the partially delivered infant, performs this act , and then completes delivery of the dead infant – is a gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited.

Here's how you can already tell that the framers of this bill are already lying: the term "partial-birth abortion" is not recognized by the medical community (as Scott pointed out in his overview of the case's main issues yesterday, the first sentence of the American Medical Association's statement opposing the legislation reads, "The term ‘Partial birth abortion' is not medical terminology."). Therefore, it's impossible that a "medical consensus" could exist around the fact that it's a "gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited," since according to doctors other than the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (who also claim that abortion causes breast cancer), it does not clearly refer to an actual procedure.

Make no mistake: this is politics, not medicine. Instead of providing clear guidance to the doctors it targets, the bill uses sensational language, clearly intended to provoke an emotional response, to describe a series of events so vague by medical standards that they could describe abortion procedures commonly performed as early as 12 weeks into a pregnancy. By the way, the Bill also contains a little-known loophole that gives women's husbands and parents (identified as the "fathers" and "grandparents" of the baby) the right to sue women or doctors who go through with the procedure described in the bill (See sec. 1531(c)(1) of the text). Unfortunately, this loophole has received almost no coverage, since the mainstream media have been too busy repeating the phrase "partial-birth abortion" to report on what the legislation actually says.

Advocates of this legislation may claim that it refers to "intact dilatation and extraction" (intact D&X), a late-term abortion procedure that accounts for less than 1 percent of the over 1 million abortions performed annually in the United States. Intact D&X, which does bear some resemblance to the imaginary procedure described above, is performed very late in pregnancy, mostly in cases where a woman discovers that her fetus has a serious condition that is incompatible with life outside the womb, or that her life or health would be severely imperiled by a normal delivery (or sometimes both, as in cases of hydrocephaly where the fetus's head can be up to 50 centimeters in diameter, meaning that a vaginal delivery would kill both the woman and the fetus). For the most part, these are wanted pregnancies. The women who undergo these procedures are usually expectant mothers, who have just received a terrible, tragic piece of news, and who must now make a very difficult decision. They need to be able to make that decision in partnership with their doctors, who in turn need to be free to present them with the safest, most appropriate medical option, in light of their particular health needs and risks. This legislation would destroy that possibility.

I'm not going to pretend that Intact D&X is a pleasant procedure, and I'm sure the women who have undergone them wouldn't either. But if anti-abortion legislators wanted to outlaw that particular procedure, why not just call it by its name? Would that make it too obvious that lawmakers are attempting to tell doctors how to do their jobs? Or is it because Intact D&X, and indeed, all late-term abortions, are not really what's at stake here?

If we want to have a conversation about why women have late-term abortions, by all means, let's have it. Let's talk about how elaborate restrictions on abortion like 24-hour waiting periods, mandatory biased counseling, and parental consent laws, delay women's ability to secure a safe and legal abortion in the first trimester. Let's talk about the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal Medicaid from funding abortions, forcing poor women to scrape together the money for a safe and legal procedure, which can take months. Let's talk about how poor, uninsured women in the United States (the richest country in the world, where healthcare is still not considered a right) often lack access to the prenatal care that would have detected fetal abnormalities at an earlier stage of pregnancy.

But we're not talking about any of those things. We're talking about the "brutal practice" of "partial-birth abortion" (which, according to Wendy Wright, President of Concerned Women for America, would be "unconscionable against even terrorists," speaking of language). We're talking about politics. We're talking about ideology masquerading as legislation – and worse, as medicine. So let's call things by their names and hope that next week, the Supreme Court calls this legislation what it is: unconstitutional. Then maybe we can get back to crafting legislation that supports women and their families, rather than criminalizing their doctors and wasting our tax dollars.