House Gives Approval to Abortion-Ban Legislation

By a veto-proof margin, the House approved and sent to President Clinton Wednesday a measure that would ban a controversial abortion procedure that is used in the second and third trimester of pregnancy.

The 296-132 vote sets the stage for a pitched veto-override battle. Clinton vetoed a nearly identical bill last year and, in a letter to abortion-rights supporters, Clinton said he would veto this year’s legislation as well.

Although the House vote in favor of the legislation was six more than the two-thirds needed to override a veto if all 435 members vote, the outlook in the Senate is less certain. When the Senate last voted on the measure in May, it fell three votes short of enough votes to override a veto.

“It’s going to be an uphill battle in the Senate,” said Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.), the measure’s chief sponsor in the House.

The abortion procedure at issue is called “partial-birth abortion” by those who would like to make it illegal in most cases and “intact dilation and extraction” by the doctors who perform it. Congress defines the procedure as “deliberately and intentionally deliver[ing] into the vagina a living fetus, or a substantial portion thereof, for the purpose of performing a procedure the physician knows will kill the fetus.”

The measure now approved by both the House and Senate would make the procedure a crime, imprisoning doctors who perform it for as long as two years and fining them. The bill would provide an exception, allowing the procedure in cases when a woman’s life is imminently threatened by her pregnancy.

The medical community is divided on the measure, with the American Medical Assn. backing a ban on the procedure and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposing it.

Should the ban survive a presidential veto, its backers are almost sure to face a long battle in the courts.

Federal judges in eight states, as well as two state court judges, have blocked enforcement--at least temporarily--of state laws that are nearly identical to the ban the House approved Wednesday. In several of the court cases, judges halted the laws’ enforcement because they ruled that the description of the abortion procedure was unconstitutionally vague.

Indeed, several judges found that the ban could apply to the majority of abortions performed in the second trimester of pregnancy as well as in the third trimester. An additional constitutional problem is that the state laws do not make an exception for abortions to preserve the health of the woman.

Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark ruling that established a woman’s right to abortion, makes the viability of the fetus a crucial factor in determining when restrictions on abortion are constitutional. A fetus is considered viable when it can live outside the mother’s womb.

Under that ruling, states cannot restrict abortion in the stages of pregnancy before viability--unless the restrictions would not place an undue burden on a woman’s right to abortion. Parental-consent laws are an example of a restriction that courts have ruled is permissible. After viability, states can restrict abortion as long as there are exceptions for the woman’s life and health.

Abortion opponents said they are unperturbed by court rulings blocking enforcement of bans on so-called partial-birth abortions, in part because they hope to appeal the rulings to the U.S. Supreme Court. They would try to persuade the high court to consider narrowing the abortion rights protected by Roe vs. Wade.

“These [state] courts have not considered that this [procedure] is outside Roe,” said Douglas Johnson, the legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee. “Roe doesn’t protect a child that is partially born. . . . It’s not just the stage of development, it’s the location [of the fetus].”

However, abortion-rights supporters said the bill’s authors purposely wrote the measure so that it would limit second-trimester abortions as well as third-trimester procedures. That would affect many more of the women who seek abortions.

About 140,000 second-trimester abortions are performed in the United States every year, compared to only several hundred third-trimester abortions.

Dara Klassel, an attorney for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the bill’s language “is so broad and vague that it could ban 90% of the abortions performed in the second trimester of pregnancy.”