Wise Veto in an Emotional Issue : Clinton is right to reject ban on one form of late-term abortions

The families gathered around President Clinton at the White House Wednesday bore wrenching testimony to the wisdom of his decision to veto a bill that would have outlawed one form of late-term abortions.

Each family at one time had to make one of the most painful decisions imaginable: to terminate a desired pregnancy after 20 weeks’ gestation because of catastrophic physical deformities in the fetus that eventually would have caused it to die. The procedure that Congress tried to ban is used very rarely--it accounts for about 500 of the 1.5 million abortions performed each year in the United States. It is done largely to preserve the life and the reproductive capability of the woman.

This procedure, which doctors call intact dilation and extraction, is indeed disturbing. Proponents of the bill to outlaw it regard the procedure as inhumane; in his veto message President Clinton said the procedure “troubled me deeply.” But alternative late-term abortion methods, those Congress did not ban, can result in uterine rupture, endangering the mother’s life and making subsequent pregnancies risky, perhaps impossible. The late-term abortion ban represented the first time Congress has barred a medical procedure. Apart from the abortion debate, this legislative departure constitutes a very troubling precedent and, in part, motivated the president’s veto. Physicians, not Congress members, should make decisions about which medical procedures are best in individual cases.

Congress does not appear to have the votes to override Clinton’s veto, so this issue may be legislatively off the books, at least for a while. But politically, the abortion issue threatens to dog the fall presidential and congressional campaigns. We have to wonder why Congress doesn’t turn its attention to more pressing national problems.