Somewhere today, a little baby won't go through the unimaginable torture of being aborted after she's developed enough to feel pain.

And somewhere today, another little unborn baby won't be dismembered, piece by piece, until he bleeds to death or dies of shock because his internal organs were methodically cut to pieces.

Little boys and girls won't be exposed to this barbarism because in many states, we banned those abortions.

National Right to Life was the first to see the possibilities for banning more abortions that came out of the Supreme Court's decision, Carhart v. Gonzales, that upheld the National Right to Life-inspired Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

In that decision, the swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy, wrote of the brutality of dismemberment abortions. He wrote that states have a legitimate interest in protecting "fetal life," or the lives of the unborn. As a swing vote, he wouldn't give states the right to ban all abortions, but his opinion did give hope that we could go beyond banning just partial-birth abortions.

Seeing this new opportunity to save lives, National Right to Life went to work.

We sponsored a law we believed the Supreme Court would uphold — and the sparse record of legal challenges suggests the pro-abortion side agrees — to ban elective abortions at a stage by which a preponderance of medical evidence indicates an unborn baby is capable of feeling pain.

Then we passed that bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, and in 14 states so far, with governors signing it into law in 13 of those, including the just-enacted law that will protect these babies in South Dakota!

Then last year, we sponsored a new bill, one that bans the barbaric practice of dismemberment abortions, in which an unborn baby is grabbed with a clasping instrument and literally torn to pieces within his mother's womb. Three states, including West Virginia last month, have enacted the bill; both houses in Mississippi have now passed it; and more states will follow soon!

It's because of your support, and the support of hundreds of thousands of other pro-life Americans, that we are able to make such progress, and save these precious babies' lives. But now we need your help more than ever.

We want to pass these bans across the country — we want to save these vulnerable babies in every state. And we are so close in some places ...

For example, South Carolina is on the verge of passing the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act that bans abortion when babies are at a stage where they can feel pain, and which Governor Nikki Haley says she will sign.

In many states, pro-abortion forces try to throw up roadblocks to passage, or misinform the public about what really happens in a dismemberment abortion, or deny the scientific evidence that unborn babies can feel pain at least by 20 weeks fetal age.

That means we often need to go to the legislatures to testify, or send outside expert witnesses. We need to work with the local media to educate the public about the truth surrounding these brutal abortions. We need to organize the grassroots pro-lifers to get their legislators to vote with us. We need to do all these things to win!

Carol Tobias is president of National Right to Life.

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