Good question!

Joseph raises an interesting question regarding my abortion-related post, asking about the actual frequency of the procedure in question:

[In other words] is this largely a symbolic issue or does its legality truly impact the "infanticide" rate?

Here's my best info. Ron Fitzsimmons testified in 1997 while executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers that partial birth abortions number around "several thousand" annually. Up until that time, NARAL and Planned Parenthood had insisted that the procedure was at least a factor of ten rarer, a couple hundred annually. If Fitzsimmons' testimony alone was not enough to explode that myth, the very concrete statistic of 182 such abortions in Kansas alone in 1999 pretty much took care of it.

Around that same time period meanwhile, murders of children in the 0-5 age group numbered around 800 annually, a statistic which has varied little in the last two decades. So it is immediately evident that not only is the number of late-term abortions (absent the PBA ban) significant, it dwarfs the age 0-5 murders by a factor of three at minimum. So I wouldn't write off these legislative efforts as striking a pose, like flag-burning, the pledge or school prayer.

Certainly the abortion-rights groups see this as more than a symbolic issue. I'm certain that they fear any limitation on the killing of the unborn to be the snowball that unleashes the avalanche that undoes Roe v. Wade. I'm equally certain that National Right to Life wishes this were so. As for me, lurking somewhere in-between, I'm still asking why the judiciary insists that the citizenry isn't justified in prohibiting the killing of thousands of perfectly viable babies.