U.S. HOUSE COMMITTEE APPROVES NEW PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION BAN

WASHINGTON, July 11, 2002 (LSN.ca) – A subcommittee of the House of Representatives today approved, on a party-line vote, a new bill to place a national ban on partial-birth abortions.  Supporters of the bill hope for approval by the full House Judiciary Committee and by the full House later this month. Congress has approved such bans twice before, but they were vetoed by President Clinton in 1996 and 1997.  On each occasion, the House voted to override the vetoes, but supporters fell short of the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate.  President Bush supports a ban on partial-birth abortion.  But the prospects for the bill in the Senate are unclear.  “We will soon learn whether Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle will allow the Senate to pass the ban on partial-birth abortions and send it to President Bush,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC).  In June, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling in Stenberg v. Carhart, struck down a Nebraska law that was similar to the proposed federal ban.  In response to that ruling, the new federal bill (H.R. 4965) more explicitly defines a prohibited partial-birth abortion as one in which “the person performing the abortion deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother,” and then kills the baby.  The bill also contains congressional findings that the method is never necessary to protect women’s health and indeed is inherently dangerous to women.  See the NRLC documents:  “Key Facts on Partial-Birth Abortion” www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/KeyfactsJune02.html footnoted congressional testimony of March 11, 1997 www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/test.html