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Banning Partial Birth Abortions
06/19/03The procedure known as partial birth abortion is one of the most barbaric and disturbing operations in today’s society. It is considered wrong by virtually every standard by which it could be measured – except the legal one. Now, we are making progress to change that.
On June 4, 2003, I joined my House colleagues in supporting the ban on the partial birth abortion procedure. The bill passed by a vote of 282 - 139. The legislation will now be reconciled with the Senate version in order to produce a unified bill to send to the President.
The entire Congress has approved bans on partial birth abortion two times already – in 1996 and 1997. However, the legislation was vetoed by President Clinton both times. The House responded to each veto with a vote to override the vetoes, but the measure fell short of the two-thirds majority needed in the Senate. In 1999, the House again passed a ban on the procedure, however the Senate did not vote on the issue that year.
Now, not only have both legislative bodies overwhelmingly approved this legislation, but President George W. Bush has indicated he will sign the ban into law.
The renewed progress of this legislation reaffirms my continued belief that there is widespread support for this ban. There is no realistic scenario in which this procedure is needed to protect the life or physical health of a mother.
Most partial birth abortions are performed in the fifth and sixth months of pregnancy. There is an incredible amount of medical evidence that a baby, at this stage, is extremely sensitive to pain. In fact, at this stage, an infant who is delivered spontaneously is usually born alive.
When legislation dealing with partial birth abortion was first introduced in Congress in 1995, major pro-abortion groups insisted that the method was used only a few hundred times a year and only in cases involving acute medical crises. These claims are repeated by some lawmakers today. However, these arguments were entirely discredited years ago when the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers admitted that the procedure is performed thousands of times every year. Even more disturbingly, it is done mostly on healthy babies of healthy mothers.
There are still those who oppose this ban. For example, Priscilla Smith, acting director of litigation for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy stated, “Here we go again. It’s as if the anti-choice leadership in the House is trying to wish away the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision finding almost identical legislation unconstitutional. Reintroducing this ban is a direct affront to the Supreme Court, the Constitution and women’s health in every respect.”
This legislative ban has nothing to do with being against choice, or being against women. This ban has everything to do with protecting innocent lives of the most vulnerable among us. The American Medical Association has stated that they “could not find any identified circumstances in which the procedure was the only safe and effective abortion method” and that “the partial delivery of a living fetus for the purpose of killing it outside the womb is ethically offensive to most Americans and physicians.”
Even some Members of Congress who support abortion on demand draw the line when it comes to partial birth abortion. Now that this important issue has been approved by both houses of Congress, I am looking forward to seeing this bill signed into law by the President.