It is, of course, impossible to know how the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Partial Birth Abortion case will appear in the review mirror of history. But it is quite possible that we will come to see it as the point at which our culture began its long recovery from the insanity of abortion-on-demand.

At a minimum, this decision is the first time the Supreme Court has allowed any meaningful limit on its fabricated “right” to abort our future. Perhaps we can best understand its Gonzales ruling as placing a “backstop” on legalized abortion. Like a real backstop on a baseball diamond, it can be circumvented; but it does help to provide definition, limits to the field. For that reason alone it should be recognized as an historic decision.

But, in the present circumstance, abortionists will simply use other methods to kill preborn children late in pregnancy. So the court’s decision will probably not directly result in the saving of a single life. The alternative methods are, if anything, more gruesome and horrible than the PBA one now outlawed.

Yet something profound has happened. The court allowed Congress to place a real limit on abortion. A reading of the opinion provides us with hope that greater things could be within reach.

In order to get to its conclusion, the majority had to deal with the argument that the national ban was unconstitutional because it did not contain a “health” exception. This has been the key problem facing nearly every pro-Life effort to restrict abortion. Since the days of Doe and Roe (1973), the Supreme Court has required every law to contain language undermining its own purpose: Every law had to provide an “out” for an abortionist who could argue with a straight face that his patient’s “health” required him to ignore the law.

The Supreme Court talked at length about this “health” issue, but did not directly overturn its previous holdings in Doe v. Bolton. However, there are passages in the opinion which suggest that the “health” exception standard may be facing serious review in future decisions. And, in any event, the Court’s majority found a way to uphold the law even though it did not contain the sacred “health” exception.

We will write more about this decision in coming days, but here is a stunning quote which ought to provide encouragement to all pro-Life advocates in the nation: