Rather than just accept that partial birth abortion is an especially gruesome act and just not perform the procedure, some doctors have taken to using a loophole in order to get around the federal ban. They kill the baby before performing the abortion:

In order to avoid any chance of a live birth and prosecution, three major Harvard-affiliated hospitals – Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women’s, and Beth Israel Deaconess – have made lethal injections in the womb a standard operating procedure for abortions at 20 weeks gestation or later.

“No physician even wants to be accused of stumbling into accidentally doing one of these procedures,” Dr. Michael F. Greene, director of obstetrics at Massachusetts General, told the Globe.

In some facilities, patients are given the choice to use lethal injection. Generally, it is believed the risk to the woman is slight, although critics of the federal ban say they should not have to be inconvenienced. Some case reports suggest a danger to the woman if one of the common drugs used, potassium chloride, is accidentally injected into her.

Prior to the actual abortion, the baby is injected with either potassium chloride – one of the drugs used for lethal injections of criminals – or the heart drug digoxin.

How do these people sleep at night? How does a person see the baby as just a clump of cells to be discarded instead of valuable life to be preserved? I cannot fathom the degree of callousness needed to throw the limp corpse of a dead baby into a waste basket. It isn’t bad enough this procedure exists. These guys go out of their way to get around a law preventing it.

UPDATE

Just so there’s no confusion about an abortion taking place after 20 weeks, here’s an actual photo of what the baby looks like at 24 weeks. Not exactly a “clump of cells”. -Andrew