Bill ending abortion procedure ruled unconstitutional
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, June 1, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO – In a ruling with coast-to-coast effect, a federal judge declared that the federal law covering a certain type of late-term abortion was unconstitutional Tuesday, saying it infringes on a woman’s right to choose.
U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton’s ruling came in one of three lawsuits challenging the legislation President Bush signed in November.
The law represented the first substantial federal legislation limiting a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Abortion rights activists said it ran counter to three decades of Supreme Court precedent.
The law banned a procedure that is known to doctors as intact dilation and extraction, but is called “partial-birth” abortion by abortion opponents. During the procedure, the living fetus is partially removed from the womb, and its skull is punctured or crushed.
Hamilton agreed with abortion rights activists that a woman’s right to choose is paramount, and that it is therefore “irrelevant” whether a fetus suffers pain, as abortion foes contend.
“The act poses an undue burden on a woman’s right to choose an abortion,” the judge wrote.
The challenge was brought by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the ruling applies to the nation’s 900 or so Planned Parenthood clinics and their doctors, who perform about half the 1.3 million abortions done each year in the United States.
Federal judges in New York and Nebraska also heard challenges to the law earlier this year from other abortion-rights forces but have yet to rule.
Planned Parenthood lawyer Beth Parker welcomed the ruling, saying it sends a “strong message” to the Bush administration “that the government should not be intruding on very sensitive and private medical decisions.”
Justice Department spokeswoman Monica Goodling said the government “will continue to devote all resources necessary to defend this act of Congress, which President Bush has said ‘will end an abhorrent practice and continue to build a culture of life in America.’ “
Justice Department attorneys argued that the procedure is inhumane, causes pain to the fetus and is never medically necessary. A government lawyer told the judge that it “blurs the line of abortion and infanticide.”
Abortion proponents argued, however, that a woman’s health during an abortion is more important than how the fetus is terminated, and that the banned method is often safer than a conventional abortion, in which the fetus is dismembered in the womb and then removed in pieces.
In her ruling, the judge said it was “grossly misleading and inaccurate” to suggest the banned procedure verges on infanticide.
The Nebraska and New York cases are expected to conclude within weeks. The outcomes, which may conflict with one another, will almost certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court.
