"The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones."

It's true, as Shakespeare had Marc Antony observe at Julius Caesar's death, that evil actions bring forth a greater harvest, for more generations, than good works produce in this world. But some good works do bear fruit after a man's death -- or after his political death, so to speak.

Rick Santorum, targeted by cultural leftists virtually since his election to the U.S. Senate in 1994 and ousted last November in the conservatives' electoral drubbing, saw a decade's tireless effort come to fruition Wednesday, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. His commitment and achievement deserve our thanks and praise.

The effort to limit this repulsive procedure was a long, repetitive slog. It began in 1993, before Mr. Santorum's election, when the National Right to Life Committee obtained and began to publicize an abortion provider's seminar presentation on the "dilation and extraction" method. Pro-lifers of every stripe -- perhaps most influentially, civil libertarian and Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff -- and even pro-choicers like the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan united to decry the procedure's barbarism.

By December 1995 both chambers of Congress had passed a Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which President Bill Clinton vetoed in 1996. The House overrode the veto, but the Senate did not, by a 57-41 vote.

By early '97 Mr. Santorum had taken over leadership of the issue in the Senate. "He was right at the heart of it," Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, told me. "He kept at it, and he was very successful."

One of Mr. Santorum's most significant achievements was to secure, in May 1997, the American Medical Association's support of the ban. The AMA letter of support praised the legislation's precise language and its respect for the medical profession, and thanked Mr. Santorum "for the opportunity to work with you toward restricting a procedure we all agree is not good medicine."

But still Mr. Clinton vetoed the ban. Again the House overrode his veto, and although this time, too, the Senate failed to override, the vote was much closer (64-36), thanks to Mr. Santorum's ability to draw colleagues to his cause -- even the ardently pro-choice Arlen Specter.

By the late '90s, more than half the states had passed bans based on the 1997 federal legislation that Mr. Santorum had spearheaded. But the Supreme Court struck down Nebraska's version in 2000, on grounds indicating that the medical terminology deemed satisfactory by the AMA was not precise enough for American judges.

So Mr. Santorum went back to the drafting stage. That's why the 2003 version upheld last week by the Supreme Court contained many pages of gruesomely specific description.

"It's disturbing to people, as well it should be," Mr. Santorum said when I called him on Friday. "We're doing violence to living babies."

But not in that way, not any more, thanks in no small part to Mr. Santorum's perseverance and political skill.

Though pro-abortion ideologues, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have greeted the ban in alarmist terms, it leaves intact the more frequently used midterm abortion procedure known as "dilation and extraction." The political gain represented by the court's decision, though welcome, is limited. The greater progress in this ongoing cultural debate, Mr. Santorum said, is personal.

"The more we talk about abortion, the more people understand and believe that our laws have to change," he said. But even when that process is tragically slow -- when judges prevent us from "expressing our collective morality through our laws," as the former senator put it -- increasing numbers of women are choosing life. In the past 14 years -- that is, since the beginning of the national debate on partial-birth abortion -- the number of abortions performed in the United States has dropped every year but one.

The next abortion legislation on the horizon would require abortion providers to give women information on the fetus's ability to feel pain. Where that point in fetal neural development lies is not at all certain. Any imprecision would surely antagonize a court that's more desperately picky about medical language than the AMA, and it's anyone's guess whether Pennsylvania's new senator, the pro-life Bob Casey Jr., has the passion or political skill necessary for such a daunting challenge.

Rick Santorum's leadership helped sensitize Americans to a horror in our midst and insisted that the courts honor our desire for a more humane society. Let us now praise tenacious men.