LeRoy Carhart is the Dr. that took Nebraska's partial birth abortion ban to court and won in a 5-4 decision and then took the federal partial birth abortion ban to court and lost 5-4 as Sandra Day O'Connor was replaced by Samuel Alito.
The Attorney General in Nebraska where Carhart practices has recently said “I'm disgusted and I'm saddened and I hate it that he's here in Nebraska, and I hate it that he's in America,” Bruning told KETV7. “I mean, this guy is one sick individual.”
Dr Carhart has close connections with the recent late term abortion Dr Tiller who was murdered recently. Dr Carhart compared Tiller to Dr Martin Luther King Jr at a recent memorial for Tiller which offended Dr Alveda King who is Dr Martin Luther King's niece.
Dr Carhart has close connections to Obama's appointed secretary of Health and Human Services see picture of him with wife, Tiller and Sebelius at the Governor Sebelius governor's mansion.
Below is a copied portion of the testimony he testified in US Disctrict Court under oath in 1997. Found these quotes at beliefnet here. Couldn't find an official testimony record online but below this testimony was found some comments by a dissenting Supreme Court Justice in this case which coincides that this does indeed happen and yet the Court at that time ruled it to be constitutional because of prior decisions in of Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey. Now we know where Obama got his influence to not pass the Born Alive Infant Protection law in Illinois. See BornAliveTruth.org. What is further disturbing is that this ban passed federally with a vote of 281-142 in the house and 64-34 in the senate. That means 176 agreed with the earlier courts decision. But it did finally pass in the courts as Alito replaced O'connor in 2007. See Partial Birth Abortion ban law passes 114 to 9 in Arkansas showing how extreme the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are in Arkansas...
Are there times when you don't remove the fetus intact? Carhart: Yes, sir.Can you tell me about that -- when that occurs?
Carhart: That occurs when the tissue fragments, or frequently when you rupture the membranes. An arm will spontaneously prolapse through the os... we talk about the forehead or the skull being first. We talked about the feet being first, but I think in probably the great majority of terminations, it's what they would call a transverse lie; so really you're looking at a side profile of a curved fetus. When the patient's cervix is already starting to contract, and they are starting to miscarry, when you rupture the waters, usually something prolapses through the uterine, through the cervical os, not always, but very often an extremity will.
What do you do then?
Carhart: My normal course would be to dismember that extremity and then go back and try to take the fetus out either foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first.
How do you go about dismembering that extremity?
Carhart: Just traction and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get ahold of which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the os, using the internal os as your countertraction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be. Sometimes you will get one leg and you can't get the other leg out.
In that situation... are you.. when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?
Carhart: Yes.
Do you consider an arm, for example, to be a substantial portion of the fetus?
Carhart: In the way I read it, I think if I lost my arm, that would be a substantial loss to me. I think I would have to interpret it that way.
And then what happens next after you remove the arm? You then try to remove the rest of the fetus?
Carhart: Then I would go back and attempt to either bring the feet down or bring the skull down, or even sometimes you bring the other arm down and remove that also and then get the feet down.
At what point is the fetus ... does the fetus die during that process?Carhart: I don't really know. I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see the fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.
Here is dissenting Judge's comments in this case which was found at www.law.cornell.edu
Starting with the statutory definition of “partial birth abortion,” I think it highly doubtful that the statute could be applied to ordinary D&E. First, the Nebraska statute applies only if the physician “partially delivers vaginally a living unborn child,” which phrase is defined to mean “deliberately and intentionally delivering into the vagina a living unborn child, or a substantial portion thereof.” §28—326(9) (emphases added). When read in context, the term “partially delivers” cannot be fairly interpreted to include removing pieces of an unborn child from the uterus one at a time.The word “deliver,” particularly delivery of an “unborn child,” refers to the process of “assist[ing] in giving birth,” which suggests removing an intact unborn child from the womb, rather than pieces of a child. See Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary 336 (1991) (defining “deliver” as “to assist in giving birth; to aid in the birth of”); Stedman’s Medical Dictionary 409 (26th ed. 1995) (“To assist a woman in childbirth”). Without question, one does not “deliver” a child when one removes the child from the uterus piece by piece, as in a D&E. Rather, in the words of respondent and his experts, one “remove[s]” or “dismember[s]” the child in a D&E. App. 45, 55 (testimony of Dr. Carhart) (referring to the act of removing the fetus in a D&E); id., at 150 (testimony of Dr. Hodgson) (same); id., at 267 (testimony of Dr. Stubblefield) (physician “dismember[s]” the fetus). See also H. R. 1833 Hearing 3, 8 (Dr. Haskell describing “delivery” of part of the fetus during a D&X). The majority cites sources using the terms “deliver” and “delivery” to refer to removal of the fetus and the placenta during birth. But these sources also presume an intact fetus, rather than dismembered fetal parts. See Obstetrics: Normal & Problem Pregnancies 388 (S. Gabbe, J. Niebyl, & J. Simpson eds. 3d ed. 1996) (“After delivery [of infant and placenta], the placenta, cord, and membranes should be examined”); 4 Oxford English Dictionary 421, 422 (2d ed. 1989) (“To disburden (a woman) of the foetus, to bring to childbirth”); B. Maloy, Medical Dictionary for Lawyers 221 (2d ed. 1989) (“To aid in the process of childbirth; to bring forth; to deliver the fetus, placenta”). The majority has pointed to no source in which “delivery” is used to refer to removal of first a fetal arm, then a leg, then the torso, etc. In fact, even the majority describes the D&E procedure without using the word “deliver” to refer to the removal of fetal tissue from the uterus. See ante, at 20 (“pulling a ‘substantial portion’ of a still living fetus”) (emphasis added); ibid. (“portion of a living fetus has been pulled into the vagina”) (emphasis added). No one, including the majority, understands the act of pulling off a part of a fetus to be a “delivery.”
To make the statute’s meaning even more clear, the statute applies only if the physician “partially delivers vaginally a living unborn child before killing the unborn child and completing the delivery.” The statute defines this phrase to mean that the physician must complete the delivery “for the purpose of performing a procedure” that will kill the unborn child. It is clear from these phrases that the procedure that kills the fetus must be subsequent to, and therefore separate from, the “partia[l] deliver[y]” or the “deliver[y] into the vagina” of “a living unborn child or substantial portion thereof.” In other words, even if one assumes, arguendo, that dismemberment–the act of grasping a fetal arm or leg and pulling until it comes off, leaving the remaining part of the fetal body still in the uterus–is a kind of “delivery,” it does not take place “before” the death-causing procedure or “for the purpose of performing” the death-causing procedure; it is the death-causing procedure. Under the majority’s view, D&E is covered by the statute because when the doctor pulls on a fetal foot until it tears off he has “delivered” a substantial portion of the unborn child and has performed a procedure known to cause death. But, significantly, the physician has not “delivered” the child before performing the death-causing procedure or “for the purpose of” performing the death-causing procedure; the dismemberment “delivery” is itself the act that causes the fetus’ death.8
Moreover, even if removal of a fetal foot or arm from the uterus incidental to severing it from the rest of the fetal body could amount to delivery before, or for the purpose of, performing a death-causing procedure, the delivery would not be of an “unborn child, or a substantial portion thereof.” And even supposing that a fetal foot or arm could conceivably be a “substantial portion” of an unborn child, both the common understanding of “partial birth abortion” and the principle that statutes will be interpreted to avoid constitutional difficulties would require one to read “substantial” otherwise. See infra, at 18—20.
