House Approves Bill to Curb Teenage Abortions

In a new Republican bid to crack down on teenage abortions, the House on Wednesday approved legislation making it a crime for adults to take minors across state lines to get an abortion and evade parental notification requirements.

The bill was approved, 276 to 150--a wide bipartisan margin, but short of the two-thirds majority that would be needed to override an expected veto by President Clinton if the bill also is passed by the Senate.

Proponents said that the measure would shore up the rights of parents to supervise their children and bolster laws passed by more than 20 states to require parental involvement in underage abortions.

“This much-needed legislation will insure the rights of parents across the nation are not trampled,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.).

The bill is just one part of a broad election-year effort by the GOP to push legislation to limit abortions and advance other social issues of concern to religious conservatives.

But Democratic critics argued that the measure to restrict teenage abortions would not stop girls who are estranged from their parents from having abortions but simply would drive them to do so with no adult help.

“This is a dangerous and misguided bill that isolates our daughters, who will be forced to fend for themselves,” said Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.).

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) has promised Senate action on the measure before the end of this session. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on it today.

The list of groups backing the bill reads like a field guide to the GOP conservative base, including the National Right to Life Committee, the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council. GOP leaders made no secret of the political significance of this and other upcoming votes on social issues.

“If it weren’t for the Republican majority, you wouldn’t see this bill on the floor of the House,” House Minority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) told conservative activists before the debate. “This is the beginning of a long line of things we need to be looking at in regulating abortions in this country.”

Later this month, the House plans a long-delayed vote to override Clinton’s 1997 veto of a bill banning a controversial late-term procedure known as “partial birth” abortion.

Abortion-rights advocates said privately that the bill penalizing adults who help teenagers cross state lines for an abortion, like the “partial-birth” abortion ban, puts them on the political defensive. It is harder to oppose seemingly modest limits on access to abortion, they conceded, than it is to fight a frontal attack on abortion rights.

In Wednesday’s final roll call, 67 Democrats joined 209 Republicans in voting for the bill. In the California delegation, the sole Republicans to break party ranks and vote against the bill were Reps. Tom Campbell of San Jose and Stephen Horn of Long Beach. The only Democrat to vote for it was Rep. Gary A. Condit of Ceres.

The bill would make it a federal offense for anyone to bring a girl under age 18 to another state to get an abortion if she is evading parental consent or notification laws in her home state. The bill would not, however, bar the girl from crossing state lines on her own.

In a statement, the Clinton administration said that it “strongly opposed” the bill--in part because it did not make an exception for close relatives who might help a girl--and that the president’s advisors would recommend a veto.

Twenty-two states have laws that require girls under 18 to tell at least one parent or grandparent of their intent to get an abortion. Four states require both parents to be involved. All of them allow girls to go to a judge for a waiver of the parental consent requirement.

In California, a 1987 law established a parental consent requirement but the state Supreme Court last year struck it down as a violation of privacy rights.

It is not clear how many teenagers cross state lines to get an abortion. But nationwide, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 1 million teens become pregnant each year; 95% of these are unintended and almost one-third end in abortions.

The debate on interstate travel and teenage abortions was fueled by a Pennsylvania case in which a 12-year-old girl became pregnant by her 18-year-old boyfriend. The boy’s mother drove the girl to a clinic in New York for an abortion without telling the girl’s mother.

Proponents of the bill argued that some abortion clinics are luring girls across state lines by placing ads in states where parental consent is required to tout their own no-consent-required services.

Abortion-rights advocates decried the vote as an effort to chip away at a right that abortion foes cannot kill outright.

“Lacking public support for their true agenda, a ban on all abortion, [social conservatives] have targeted the most vulnerable and least politically powerful constituency--young women facing crisis pregnancies,” said Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.