House Votes to Criminalize Partial-Birth Abortions

The House Wednesday night gave final congressional approval to a bill that criminalizes a controversial late-term abortion procedure and asserts federal authority for the first time over a specific medical practice.

The measure, identical to one approved by the Senate in December, passed on a vote of 286 to 129, with more than a third of the chamber’s Democrats joining the Republican majority in voting yes.

It now goes to the White House for an expected veto by President Clinton, who believes doctors should be allowed greater latitude to perform the procedure to protect the health of a woman--not just to save her life, as the bill provides.

The margin in the House would be large enough to override a veto, but the Senate appears to lack enough votes to do so. The measure passed, 54 to 44, in the Senate, well short of a two-thirds majority.

“Make no mistake about it--partial-birth abortion is child abuse, and those who do it have an unfettered license to kill,” said Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.). “Veto this bill and there is no doubt that Bill Clinton will go down in history as the abortion President.”

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma) said the bill was “a very crude attempt to make a political point . . . [and] a frontal attack” on abortion rights in this country.

In the procedure a physician extracts a fetus feet first from the womb and through the birth canal until all but its head is exposed. Then the tips of surgical scissors are thrust into the base of the fetus’s skull, a suction catheter is inserted through the opening and the brain is removed.

The legislation prescribes up to two years in prison for physicians who perform a partial-birth abortion for any reason other than to save a woman’s life. The burden of proof would rest with prosecutors. The measure contains no sanctions against women who have such abortions.

The bill also would allow the father to sue for damages, but only if he was married to the pregnant woman at the time of the abortion.

Last November, the House approved a bill that would have put the burden of proof on the doctor--meaning that a physician-defendant would have to go to court and prove that he or she had performed the procedure to save a woman’s life.

But to get the abortion measure enacted by Congress and sent to Clinton, the House embraced the Senate version and agreed to shift the burden of proof to the prosecution.

That measure’s “life-of-the-woman” exception was contained in an amendment written by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Abortion-rights advocates had sought another exception--to protect physicians from prosecution when the health of the pregnant woman is at stake. But antiabortion forces successfully argued that such an exemption would create a loophole large enough to accommodate virtually any circumstance, including emotional well-being.

The White House had no comment on the bill’s passage, but press officials referred reporters to a Feb. 28 letter that Clinton sent to Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. In it, Clinton told Hyde that he is “prepared to support” a bill that bans the procedure but only if it exempts from prosecution physicians who perform it to “preserve the life of the woman or avert serious adverse health consequences to the woman.”

The president expressed anguish over the controversy, saying he had “studied and prayed about this issue” and, as Arkansas governor, had signed into law a bill that barred third-trimester abortions. That law, however, exempted physicians in cases where they deemed the procedure necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.

The president also called the procedure “very disturbing” and said he “cannot support its use on an elective basis.”

Despite the harsh rhetoric of the congressional debate, the vote did not break along partisan lines. Seventy-two Democrats voted for the bill, including Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), who called the procedure “a brutal and inhumane procedure that should be banned.”

Among the 15 Republicans who voted against the bill were Reps. Jan Meyers of Kansas and Nancy L. Johnson of Connecticut, both of whom inveighed against what they called government intrusion.

The medical community is deeply divided on the issue. The 38,000-member California Medical Assn. strongly opposed the bill, saying the measure would “create an unwarranted intrusion into the physician-patient relationship. . . . “

The American Medical Assn.’s legislative council had recommended that the nation’s largest doctors organization endorse the bill, however, while the AMA’s board of trustees declined to take a position.

Antiabortion activists inside and outside of Congress acknowledged that they singled out the partial-birth abortion for attack because of its very gruesome nature--one that, at least on the face of it, many find distasteful.

Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.), the bill’s chief sponsor, said after the vote: “I believe partial-birth abortion is not an acceptable practice in our society. It is detestable. If, as a society, we do not act to protect innocent children at the most vulnerable time of their lives, we do not deserve to call ourselves civilized.”

Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.), an abortion-rights supporter, rued afterward that “this is just the beginning” of congressional action to curtail abortion. Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney (D-Ga.) called the vote “the first step toward ending a woman’s right to choose.”

The bill’s champions said the procedure is inhumane, tantamount to infanticide and often used by women who change their minds late in pregnancy about giving birth. Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee Inc., maintains that the procedure is far more common than abortion-rights advocates would have the public believe. He says that cleft palates, spina bifida and maternal depression are among the reasons that doctors do partial-birth abortions.

But the bill’s critics said women have few, if any, feasible alternatives in certain life-threatening situations, especially late in their pregnancies involving a severely deformed fetus that is unlikely to survive after birth.