Despite ruling, a stain clings

Amid the fading furor over the killing of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld a state ban on a procedure in which he specialized, partial-birth abortion. Tiller’s slaying was heinous and deserves full punishment under the law. The acts in which Tiller practiced were legal in Kansas, but barbaric. Virginia lawmakers were right to outlaw partial-birth abortion, and the Fourth Circuit to affirm them. One wicked act cannot make others just.

Tiller became a millionaire performing late-term abortions at his clinic in Wichita, Kan., long a center of the abortion wars. He gave chunks of that money to elected officials, such as former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who in exchange for campaign boosts helped keep his business humming by ensuring laws remained favorable to him. Everybody won.

Well, not quite everybody. Tiller performed hundreds of late-term abortions each year. After federal lawmakers approved a nationwide partial-birth abortion ban in 2003, Tiller sued. He preferred a sanitized label, calling the procedure intact dilation and extraction, but the method remained horrific: unborn children were partially delivered, then killed, sometimes by crushing their skulls.

Facing legal pressures over that practice, Tiller instead began injecting a fatal dose of digoxin into babies’ hearts. A life-saving medication used to treat patients who suffered from congestive heart failure became a tool for killing. It also allowed late-term abortions to be performed without violating the partial-birth ban, though surely its spirit was trampled.

Abortion foes, who for decades struggled to penetrate the American consciousness with the act’s realities, found a lightning rod in the partial-birth procedure. Even some of those inclined to nod affirmatively to cries of choice are repulsed by partial birth’s raw brutality. That has drawn the country closer to the issue’s hard question, and the only one that truly matters: When does life begin?

President Barack Obama, who frets over the prospect of a young woman being “punished with a baby,” offered what appeared to be an answer in a moving essay published on Father’s Day in Parade magazine. Urging men to take seriously the responsibility of fatherhood, he wrote, “We need fathers to step up to realize that their job does not end at conception ...” What happens then at conception?

Drawing a conclusion, no matter how obvious, is above Obama’s pay grade, or so he says, or rather his backers. His philosophical cowardice on this topic is not his alone; it’s a cancer in his party. Many Democrats wince at the procedure for which Tiller fought but tread lightly or flee when the topic is raised. State Sen. Creigh Deeds, of Bath County, the party’s gubernatorial nominee, is an example. He once voted for a partial-birth ban but now opposes it.

Such reversals are the product of the abortion lobby’s iron squeeze on left-leaning political candidates. Democrats could use more fiery Irishmen like the late Bob Casey, the former Pennsylvania governor whose doggedly pro-life position riled party power brokers straight up to President Bill Clinton.

Politics and madmen such as Scott Roeder, Tiller’s killer, cast a thick haze over the subject of abortion. But the Fourth Circuit Court provided a small but needed measure of clarity. America’s short, proud history is stained by two great injustices, slavery at the country’s founding and the bitter racism that endured long after emancipation, and abortion, which chokes life in its incipiency. Banning a form of the latter is a solitary suture for a wound that yet gapes.