President Bush will soon have the honor of signing into law the first federal partial birth abortion ban. This long-anticipated legislation sets back the abortion industry's well-funded goal of divorcing morality and politics by destroying the former.

It's a small step in the right direction, a step that Mr. Morality (a.k.a. impeached former President Clinton) vetoed more than once, probably in hopes that lying and adulterous presidents would look like saints next to those really mean third-trimester baby killers.

Whatever Clinton's reasons, though, for once, public opinion polls didn't seem to weigh in his decision. Since the early 1990s, 5 to 10 percent more adults deem abortion on par with murder, and growing public discontent with abortion certainly helped Congress repeatedly reach bipartisan consensuses.

There might be a spark of life in this culture of death. 

Our new knowledge about the abortion procedure is responsible for this shift in public opinion. No one with half a heart can watch ultrasound images of babies writhing and screaming in pain without recoiling in disgust. Planned Parenthood fights so adamantly against informed consent because it realizes that, once women know the facts, the horrible truth is self-evident!

Over 30 years, U.S. abortionists have killed nearly 45 million babies. Very few of these have been partial birth abortions, so stopping this heinous procedure is just a drop in the bucket.

The meaning of the legislation is not in the number of babies it actually protects, however, but rather in the precedent it sets against nihilistic radical feminism.

Liberals believe that our right to choose trumps any sense of right or wrong. And by choose, of course, they mean abort. That's how it is with the left. Whether it's making babies or killing them, they show no restraint. 

It's not just that they're apathetic to good and evil; it's that they hate good and love evil. They've set us on a road marked for destruction.

Our President and many in Congress have given us hope, however, by reasserting some semblance of natural morality. They've chosen to stand against the lies of the liberal establishment, handing us a symbolic victory over leftist relativism.

It's not a victory without costs, however. Establishing national standards for abortion is simultaneously a step backwards for the conservative movement. We've long asserted that the most effective governance takes place at state and local levels.

Those of us who have actually read the U.S. Constitution (a precious minority, these days, but try putting that on a U. of Michigan application!) realize that we have a clear mandate of what the feds can and cannot regulate.

The 10th amendment makes it clear that any power the Constitution has not specifically granted Congress belongs to the states or to the people.

That includes abortion.

So technically, a federal ban on partial birth abortion is unconstitutional.

At the risk of being a hypocrite, I still support the ban as a stepping-stone to a larger, more local victory. Lives are at stake, after all.

We still need to remember that federal laws will never solve the abortion problem, just as they never solve any problem. We have 50 years of Great Society and New Deal fallout to clean up as it is. We have a Medicare reform bill in the works that will increase entitlement spending more than any other bill since 1965. More federal regulations only promise to intensify the problem.

The answer is not at the national level. Overturning Roe v. Wade won't do much in practice because state laws will still permit more than one million legal abortions annually. We will have to push an abortion ban through each state legislature or through the tough constitutional amendment process.

Such victories are impossible at this point given the decline of American values and the continued expansion of our "culture of death" in the hands of a liberal media and educational establishment.

What we need first is cultural renewal-a change in the hearts and minds of people. That's how we pressed the partial birth abortion ban, and that's how we'll make progress in the future.

We have a long way to go, but thanks to the way a few good men and women in Washington have responded to the reawakening of the American conscience, we're reaching the goal one step at a time.