The Senate will vote this week or early next week on President Barack Obama’s nominee for Attorney General. When it does, senators will be voting on a nominee in Loretta Lynch who once defended partial-birth abortions.
Lynch is the nominee to replace pro-abortion Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder, who is pro-abortion and who used his post in the Obama administration to target pro-life people, announced in September he would step down from his position when a replacement has been confirmed.
During her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lynch admitted to pro-life Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina that she once signed onto a brief the Planned Parenthood abortion business submitted in its legal battle to overturn the Congressional ban on partial-birth abortions. The Supreme Court eventually sided against Planned Parenthood and upheld the ban on the gruesome abortion procedure.
Lynch signed on to an amicus brief in the Partial Birth Abortion case before the Supreme Court where she served as an amici in favor of Planned Parenthood. She argued that the ban against the killing of partially born children was “unconstitutionally vague and threatens the integrity of the criminal justice system.”
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Today, CNS News has more on that legal brief and the wording Lynch used to defend partial-birth abortions:
In their brief, Lynch and the other former U.S. attorneys argued that the term “living fetus” was too vague to be understood by those responsible for following and enforcing the law.
The law defined a partial-birth abortion as follows: “(1) the term partial-birth abortion means an abortion in which the person performing the abortion (A) deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus; and (B) performs the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus.”
In the amicus she signed, Lynch and her fellow former U.S. attorneys argued that this definition did not provide sufficient “clarity” as to what it prohibited.
“The statute purports to prohibit all abortions where the doctor ‘deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus’ up until a point on the fetus ‘for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered fetus’ and ‘perform[s] the overt act, other than completion of delivery,’” said Lynch’s amicus. “But, this definition fails to provide any clarity as to what procedures are prohibited, and thus fails constitutional due process requirements.”
For example, the former U.S. attorneys argued, the term “living fetus” was “hopelessly vague.”
On April 18, 2007, the Supreme Court announced its opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, holding that the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was constitutional. The ban has stopped as many as 15,000 such abortions.
Casey Mattox of Alliance Defending Freedom,previously wrote at LifeNews that “The Gonzales decision held that the federal ban on partial-birth abortions, except where necessary to save a woman’s life, was facially constitutional – meaning that generally speaking the ban was constitutionally sound. Opponents of the ban, including Planned Parenthood and their allies, had argued strenuously that the law was unconstitutional because it lacked a “health” exception.”
“Hours after the decision, Planned Parenthood was still warning of its imminent negative impact on women’s health,” he said. “Over five years later, Justice Ginsburg and the nation still wait. Although women’s health was allegedly immediately harmed by the decision, we have not yet seen an as-applied challenge on behalf of one of these women, nor have we seen even one documented story of a woman whose health was impacted by the unavailability of a partial-birth abortion.”
Lynch, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, is in her second stint as U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, appointed by President Obama in 2010 and also serving in the same post from 1999 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. She will face full confirmation in the Senate, where Republicans are in control.
Lynch would be the second woman to serve as attorney general and the second African-American to hold the post.
ACTION: Contact your senators at https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm and urge a No vote on Lynch’s nomination.
