Kentucky is on the brink of becoming the ninth state to approved a ban on the vicious and gruesome practice of dismemberment abortions.

By an overwhelming vote of 31-5, the Kentucky Senate on Thursday approved House Bill 454. On March 12 the House approved a slightly different version of HB 454 by an equally one-sided vote of 71-11.

The two bodies will iron out their minor differences when the legislature reconvenes March 27. Kentucky’s very pro-life Gov. Matt Bevin is expected to sign the bill.

Eight states have already passed bans on dismemberment abortions: Kansas (2015); Oklahoma (2015); West Virginia (2016); Mississippi (2016); Alabama (2016); Louisiana (2016); Arkansas (2017); and Texas (2017).

During discussion in the Senate Judiciary Committee, the “ACLU of Kentucky and other people who testified against the proposal this year say the bill will significantly reduce women’s access to safe abortions,” according to Morgan Watkins of the Louisville Courier Journal whose story did not make a pretense at balance. In addition, they complained that the bill would be challenged in court and cost the state money.

Reuter’s Steve Bittenbender reported that “Addia Wuchner, a Republican, tweeted after a state Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, that her bill protects ‘unborn children in Kentucky from intentional bodily dismemberment.’”

In a dismemberment abortion, a living baby is pulled out, a piece at a time. The abortionist uses clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, “through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush, and /or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body to cut or rip it off.”

Watkins’ attempt to minimize the brutally was to tell readers that the baby is small and weighs only a few ounces at 11 weeks. Bittenbender quoted the abortion industry’s in-house think tank to tell readers that most abortions are done in the first trimester:

While dilation and evacuation is used in most second-trimester abortions, nearly 90 percent of all abortions are performed in the first trimester, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Neither addressed what South Carolina state Sen. Katrina Shea said during debate in that state’s Senate Medical Affairs Committee over its ban on dismemberment abortions:

“If this was a bill about puppies” Sen. Shealy add, “we would have people lined so far down that hall to save a dog that we couldn’t get them in the building. I cannot even understand why we are having an argument here.”