This case challenges Arkansas’s law prohibiting abortion providers from dismembering unborn children while they are still alive.2 Ark. Code Ann. §§ 20-16-1802(3), 20-16-1803. Arkansas’s law does not prohibit abortions at any point during pregnancy. It merely provides that abortions cannot be performed in a particularly heinous way. In so doing, Arkansas’s law extends a modicum of compassion and respect to unborn children.

The live-dismemberment procedure that Arkansas’s law regulates, which is commonly known as a D&E abortion, is a singularly gruesome procedure. The district court described it as one in which “fetal tissue generally comes apart.”