House OKs ban on partial-birth abortion

A ban on partial-birth abortion is well on its way to becoming law, after the House approved it late yesterday on a 282-139 vote.

“After eight long years, Congress will finally send the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act to a president willing to sign it,” said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Texas Republican.

“The debate over the rights of the unborn will continue, and new battles will be fought. But in the meantime, the American people will take this one stand … on behalf of the innocent,” he said.

Voting for the bill were 220 Republicans and 62 Democrats. Voting against it were 133 Democrats, five Republicans and the chamber’s lone independent. Three Republican and 10 Democratic lawmakers did not vote.

Congress has twice passed a ban on partial-birth abortion, but both measures were vetoed by President Clinton, and although the House overrode the vetoes, the Senate did not.

In a statement after the vote last night, President Bush called it “a shared priority that will help build a culture of life in America.”

“I urge Congress to quickly resolve any differences and send me the final bill as soon as possible so that I can sign it into law,” he said.

The bill now goes to conference, where it will be reconciled with a nearly identical bill that was passed by the Senate earlier this year. The measures would ban partial-birth abortions except when necessary to save the mother’s life.

In a partial-birth abortion — also known among some in the medical community as dilation and extraction — the baby is partially delivered before its skull is pierced and its brain sucked out.

Pro-choice lawmakers and groups lamented the bill’s passage, saying it is another attempt by the president and the Republicans to chip away at abortion rights. The groups vowed to challenge the legislation in court.

“We expect the president will sign it, and we will immediately go into court,” said Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation. “This bill will never take effect. It will be declared unconstitutional.”

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, New York Democrat, said the “anti-woman and unconstitutional” bill was evidence of the Republican Party’s “true agenda,” which is “to roll back, chip away at a woman’s right to choose.”

Opponents of the bill say it is just as unconstitutional as a Nebraska ban struck down by the Supreme Court in 2000.

But bill sponsor Rep. Steve Chabot, Ohio Republican, says the legislation provides a more precise definition of the partial-birth-abortion procedure, thereby addressing the justices’ concerns that the Nebraska law also could have banned another abortion act in which a fetus is dismembered in the womb.

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