‘Partial-Birth’ Abortion Ban Stalls in Senate

Abortion-rights advocates in the Senate on Wednesday derailed a controversial bill that would outlaw “partial-birth” abortions, a development that abortion foes conceded was a resounding defeat for their legislative agenda.

Backers of the bill, passed overwhelmingly by the House last week, failed to get the full Senate to vote on the measure. Instead the legislation was sent to the Judiciary Committee, where it is certain to be significantly altered, and perhaps killed. As written, the legislation would ban a rare and controversial late-term abortion procedure.

The bill’s backers said the procedure is inhumane and amounts to murder. But critics said women have few, if any, feasible alternatives in certain life-threatening situations, especially late in pregnancy. They also argued that a woman’s right to choose must not be deprived by Congress.

In the end, however, it was their demand for legislative hearings on such a technical issue that carried the day.

“This may be one of those occasions where the floor debate changed minds,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who proposed the motion to send the controversial measure to the Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who led the Democratic fight against the bill, agreed. She said the argument was won gradually by “stressing process, rationality and the extremism of putting a physician in jail for the first time.”

The bill would ban a procedure in which a physician extracts a fetus, feet first, from the womb and through the birth canal until all but its head is exposed. Then a hole is made in the base of the fetus’ skull, a suction catheter is inserted through the opening and the brain is removed.

Backers of the technique say it is typically performed only in late-term pregnancies to save a woman’s life or to abort a fetus that is freshly discovered to be severely deformed and unlikely to survive long after birth.

But Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), the bill’s sponsor, called the abortion technique “a brutal, cruel way to kill a child.”

Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) called the procedure “an act that any civilized society should find offensive.”

The bill would punish doctors who perform the procedure with prison terms of up to two years, or fines, or both.

The legislation would grant doctors a defense against criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits if they could prove they “reasonably believed” the procedure was necessary to save a woman’s life and that “no other procedure would suffice for that purpose.”

But critics said such an “affirmative defense” would be all but meaningless since it would come into play only after an accused physician was arrested and charged.

Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Me.) denounced the proposal as “an unprecedented [government] intrusion” into a decision better left to a woman and her doctor.

Gramm acknowledged, just before the final vote, that the bill would be doomed if sent to the Judiciary Committee. “It is going to be killed,” Gramm predicted. “We will not see it again.”

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, agreed with Gramm’s assessment. “A vote to send it to the Judiciary Committee would be a vote to kill it,” he said.

To abortion-rights advocates, a central flaw in the bill is the absence of a provision to exempt physicians from prosecution in cases where the life or health of the pregnant woman is at stake--the linchpin of the Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark ruling in Roe vs. Wade.

That decision granted women’s right to abortions during early pregnancy but allowed states to restrict abortions beyond the point of “fetal viability”--usually between 23 and 28 weeks--except when the woman’s life or health is in peril.

If such exemption language were added to Smith’s bill in the Judiciary Committee, Boxer said in an interview she would not “have any problem with that [because] that would be fully consistent with Roe vs. Wade.”

“We must hear from those women whose lives were saved, from their doctors and from the legal experts if we are to truly understand the implications of the bill,” Boxer said.

Specter argued that it is “really indispensable” for hearings to be held “because of the very complex matters that are involved in this issue. There are humanitarian, medical, ethical and constitutional considerations.”

Among those who argued for an immediate floor vote on the bill was Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). “It’s not that complicated,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

The bill was the subject of a hearing earlier this year by the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, chaired by Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.), author of the identical House bill. Shortly after the House passed the bill on Nov. 1 by a vote of 288 to 139, Dole scheduled Smith’s bill for Senate action.

Even though Specter had six other GOP colleagues as co-sponsors of his motion to send the bill to the Judiciary Committee, the outcome was in doubt for much of the day--so much so, in fact, that Vice President Al Gore was put on alert in case his tie-breaking vote would be needed.

In the end, the bill’s backers smelled defeat and reluctantly urged all senators to vote to send the measure to the committee.

The final vote was 90 to 7. The seven Republicans voting against sending the bill to committee were Gramm, Dan Coats of Indiana, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, Bill Frist of Tennessee and Jesse Helms of North Carolina.