Ethics Newsline®

SAN FRANCISCO
A U.S. District Court judge in San Francisco last week overturned a federal restriction on abortion, ruling that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act is unconstitutional in at least three separate ways.

The law, the first federal restriction on abortion since the landmark Roe v. Wade case over 30 years ago, was passed by wide margins in Congress and signed into law by President Bush last November.

The process — called “partial birth abortion” by politicians and opposition groups, and “intact dilation and extraction” by most doctors — involves “partially removing a fetus from the uterus and puncturing or crushing its skull,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Two other federal cases involving the act, one in Nebraska and another in New York, are currently pending, and judgments are expected later this summer.

The New York Times reports that U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton, in declaring the ban unconstitutional, stated that “it placed an undue burden on women seeking abortions, that its language was dangerously vague, and that it lacked a required exception for medical actions needed to preserve the woman’s health.”

A similar state law adopted by Nebraska was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000. That case,

Carhart vs. Stenberg, was cited by Judge Hamilton in her ruling, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Times also reports that “all three cases challenging the law focused heavily on the testimony of dueling medical experts, who offered diverging views on whether and when the procedure was necessary, how common and safe it was, and whether fetal pain existed.”

Opponents of the act hailed the judge’s decision as a major victory. Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood, which, along with its San Francisco affiliate and the City of San Francisco brought the suit, told the Washington Post that the decision “reaffirmed a woman’s right to choose and a doctor’s right to practice medicine.”

The White House issued a statement saying that “the president strongly disagrees with today’s California court ruling,” according to the New York Times. “The administration will take every necessary step to defend this law in the courts.”

Judge Hamilton’s ruling applies to doctors in the nation’s approximately 900 Planned Parenthood clinics as well as the City of San Francisco — both plaintiffs in the case. She declined to apply the ruling to either Nebraska or New York, deferring instead to the courts in those states, which are expected to rule shortly.