"This is very important legislation that will end an abhorrent practice and continue to build a culture of life in America," Bush said in a statement issued in Singapore. "I look forward to signing it into law."
As a practical matter, the law likely will not take effect any time soon. Legal experts have said it could be three years before the court challenges reach a conclusion; in the meantime, the law may be blocked from taking effect.
If upheld in court, the law will be a legislative landmark in the long history of congressional debate about how far it can go in restricting abortion under the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling, which established, under the constitutional right to privacy, a woman's right to have an abortion before a fetus can live on its own. While Congress has passed many measures restricting federal funding for abortion, it has never criminalized an established abortion procedure.
At issue is the procedure called partial-birth abortion because it involves partially removing an intact fetus from the womb before it is destroyed. Typically, before the fetus' head emerges, scissors are used to penetrate its skull and brain matter is removed. The procedure, called dilation and extraction by medical practitioners, is usually performed during the second trimester of pregnancy; the vast majority of abortions are performed during the first three months.
There is some dispute about the frequency of such procedures. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, estimated there were about 2,200 dilation-and-extraction abortions in 2000, up from 363 in 1996. Abortion opponents said that figure was too low. But in either case, it likely would be just a fraction of the 1.3 million abortions performed nationally in 2000, the latest year for which figures are available.
Under the bill approved by Congress, doctors would face fines and up to two years in prison for knowingly performing such an abortion. The authors of the legislation included congressional "findings of fact" that suggest the procedure is never medically necessary.
The House approved the bill about three weeks ago, after House and Senate negotiators ironed out minor differences between versions of the bill passed by the two chambers earlier this year.
The Senate debate could be the last chapter of a legislative saga for the bill, which first became an issue in Congress in 1995. With a sense of historical moment, the concluding Senate debate was punctuated with passionate appeals from both sides, as it had every time the issue came before Congress.
