Bush Signs Bill to Ban a Type of Abortion
WASHINGTON — President Bush on Wednesday signed into law a ban on a controversial abortion procedure, implementing the most significant restriction on abortion in three decades.
The ban on the medical procedure critics call "partial-birth abortion" immediately prompted a wave of court challenges likely to leave the legality of the law in limbo for the coming election year.
Minutes after Bush signed the legislation, a federal judge in Lincoln, Neb., issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Justice Department from enforcing the law. Similar court challenges were pending in San Francisco and New York.
Opponents of the law describe it as the first federal ban of a safe medical procedure. Proponents, including the president, say that it prohibits "a terrible form of violence that has been directed against children who are inches from birth."
"America stands for liberty, for the pursuit of happiness and for the unalienable right of life," Bush told an overflow crowd of abortion opponents, who gave him four standing ovations during his 11-minute speech in the Ronald Reagan Building. "And the most basic duty of government is to defend the life of the innocent. Every person, however frail or vulnerable, has a place and a purpose in this world."
In the 30 years since the Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs. Wade that established constitutional protection for ending a pregnancy as long as the fetus could not live on its own, Congress has passed many measures restricting funding for abortions. This is the first federal law to criminalize an established abortion procedure.
Under the new law, doctors would face fines and up to two years in prison for knowingly performing such a procedure.
The vast majority of abortions -- more than 90%, according to Planned Parenthood -- are performed in the first three months of pregnancy and would be unaffected by the new law, which bans certain practices usually performed in the second trimester as part of a type of abortion physicians call "dilation and extraction."
Abortion opponents use the term "partial birth" because the procedure involves partially removing an intact fetus from the womb before it is destroyed. Typically, before the head emerges, scissors are used to penetrate the skull and brain matter is removed.
