Votes Signal New Abortion Debate Stage

For the first time, the House Thursday took up the touchy question of whether parents should be notified before a minor may obtain an abortion and voted to leave the issue in the hands of the states.

At the same time, a House Judiciary subcommittee approved a bill that would penalize people who block access to abortion clinics, although several supporters expressed concern that the bill could be misused to prevent the kinds of civil disobedience employed by the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.

Taken together, the two votes demonstrate that Congress has moved into a new phase in the national debate over abortion. Now that recent court rulings and the election of President Clinton seem to have secured a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, abortion rights advocates in Congress are turning to subtler aspects of the issue and sometimes finding themselves in disagreement.

The vote on parental notification offered a case in point. While many abortion rights advocates say that notification negates a girl’s basic right to abortion, others side with abortion opponents in arguing that parents have a right to know when an underage girl is planning to have an abortion.

Currently, laws in 21 states mandate some parental involvement in the decision; California’s law has been enjoined by the courts and is not in force.

Although the House voted, 243 to 179, to defeat a proposal by Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.) that would have imposed parental notification requirements on federally funded family-planning clinics, many members cautioned against viewing the action as a stand against notification. Rather, they said, it indicated that the majority believes the matter should be left to the states.

In another vote that showed how significantly the debate has shifted, the House, for the first time since 1986, approved legislation authorizing federal funding for family-planning programs.

In recent years, a similar funding bill had been stalled because of then-President George Bush’s ban on abortion counseling at the nation’s 4,000 federally funded clinics. Clinton lifted the ban on his second day in office.

“With this legislation, I hope that we can expand these services and move beyond the abortion debate to the health debate,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health and the environment and sponsor of the legislation. “The continued use of the family-planning program as a pawn in this debate is self-defeating, leaving poor women with fewer and fewer ways to prevent pregnancy.”

In its vote on clinic blockades, the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime and criminal justice vowed to try to prevent such incidents as the recent murder of a Florida abortion doctor.

The measure would impose heavy fines and imprisonment on protesters who block access to clinics.

“Why is new legislation so important? Why should the federal government get involved?” asked Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the subcommittee chairman.

“The answer is violence,” he said. “And our obligation to protect our citizens in cases where local laws are either inadequate or unenforced.”