On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania House voted 132 to 65 in favor of legislation that would both ban abortions past twenty weeks of pregnancy and the dismemberment abortion procedure (D&E).
HB 1948 makes exceptions only for severe physical threats to the mother’s life or health. It would move Pennsylvania’s current abortion limit up from 24 weeks.
Despite what the procedure entails, abortion advocates falsely claim that “dismemberment abortion” is a “medically inaccurate” name for dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortions, a procedure commonly used in the second trimester. The National Abortion Federation’s guide on dismemberment abortions actually removes the baby from the diagram, instead depicting forceps entering an empty uterus.
Former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino describes dismemberment abortions in greater detail as part of Live Action News’s Abortion Procedures project in the following video:
As for the 20-week ban, science shows that preborn babies are capable of feeling pain around this point.
Democrat Governor Tom Wolf has threatened to veto the bill if the legislature sends it to his desk, although it currently has eleven Democrat sponsors in the state Senate. The House vote had 65% of the 66% needed to override a veto; the Senate’s 31 Republicans plus the eleven Democrats would be more than enough.
The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation’s legislative director Maria Gallagher cheered the news, declaring that “these common abortions are performed on fully developed, preborn babies at their most vulnerable, and when they should be the safest.”
PPLF executive director Michael Ciccocioppo added, “Most countries are civilized enough to realize pre-born babies should not be torn apart. There are only seven countries in the world, including human rights-violating countries such as North Korea and China, that allow this terrible act.”
