It has taken almost 15 years to get this far, but finally, a law banning the practice of Partial-Birth Abortion, sometimes called "D&X" (Dilation and Extraction), has been allowed to take effect in the United States. This is a victory for humanity -- and for the right of the American People to have at least a small voice in the issue of legal abortion.

This is the first time in the United States since Roe v. Wade that an abortion procedure has been recognized in law as too abhorrent to be tolerated.

The fact remains that many other abortion procedures are equally as barbaric and inhuman, or worse.

It is frightening to note that there remain on the Supreme Court of the United States four Justices who are apparently convinced that abortionists have a Constitutional Right to deliver a living, human child up to the head and then stab him or her in the back of the neck with a pair of scissors.

It is also sobering to consider that the abortion rights people - perhaps most notably Planned Parenthood - fought an all out battle to maintain unfettered partial-birth abortion.

We are happy to see that President Bush's Supreme Court appointees (Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, Jr.) whatever their personal opinions about abortion per se, have seen fit to allow the American people to stop at least this thinly veiled practice of infanticide.

People for Life began circulating petitions in northwestern Pennsylvania and lobbying Members of Congress in support of the first federal legislation to ban Partial-Birth Abortion in 1995.

People for Life, established in 1973, is the Erie County affiliate of the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation (Harrisburg, PA) and the National Right to Life Committee (Washington, DC). We are a community-based, nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and all-volunteer organization dedicated to protecting our fellow human beings from the primitive and violent "solutions" of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.