Other methods could also be targeted using the bill’s open-ended wording, say abortion rights advocates.

Sponsored by Republican senators, the measure gained a number of Democratic votes in passing 64 to 33. It will be put before the House sometime over the next month.

If it passes there, as is expected, it will go to President Bush. He left no doubt of his intention, praising the bill as "an important step toward building a culture of life in America."

The measure was given the misleading name of "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act." The emotive term, used by opponents of a woman’s right to choose in targeting the procedure, is not recognized by the American Medical Association or the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Intact dilation and extraction, first developed in 1992, involves the removal of a largely intact fetus.

Many doctors consider that it brings fewer risks to the pregnant woman than the more common method of dilation and evacuation (D&E), in which the fetus is removed in pieces.

The bill’s wording is vague enough to cover not just dilation and extraction abortions, but those using D&E, said Kate Michelman, the head of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL). "This bill is written in such a way as to apply to not just one procedure," she said. "It would substantially affect the majority of abortions done after the first trimester."

The bill’s vagueness and inclusion of criminal penalties for doctors, Michelman said, would have a chilling effect on the willingness of doctors to perform abortions.

"This legislation not only endangers women’s health, but is unconstitutional, deceptive, and dangerous. And it is only the beginning of a coordinated strategy to rollback a woman’s right to choose and insert government into our private lives," stated Michelman.

Defenders of a woman’s right to control her body have vowed to challenge the constitutionality of the law. An earlier attempt at a similar ban in the state of Nebraska was narrowly overturned by the Supreme Court in 2000.

Opponents of women’s right to abortion have targeted the late-term procedure since the mid-1990s. Both houses of Congress passed a similar bill in 1996, only to face a veto by President Clinton. He assured legislators, however, that he would have signed if it had included exceptions to the ban in cases where continuing with the pregnancy would threaten the woman’s health.

A number of capitalist politicians in both parties have sought to obscure their opposition to abortion rights as a whole by focusing on this medical procedure as somehow particularly objectionable. "Abortion takes life away," said House majority leader William Frist during the Senate debate, "and partial-birth abortion does so in a manner that is brutal and barbaric and morally offensive to the mainstream medical community."  
 
Limits to abortion access
Since the historic Roe v. Wade decision, made in the wake of the rise of the women’s liberation movement and a wave of protests for abortion rights, capitalist legislators at both federal and state levels have enacted a number of measures aimed at taking the option of abortion out of reach for millions of women.

These restrictions and growing costs have had the greatest impact on working-class women.

These politicians’ piecemeal approach has been dictated by the fact that public support for abortion rights has grown over the three intervening decades, while hard-line opposition has shrunk.

In 1976 the federal government denied the use of Medicaid funds for abortion.

Since 1982 the number of abortion providers in the United States has dropped by 37 percent. Over that time there has been shift away from hospitals providing abortion services towards private clinics doing so.

Today 86 of the 276 metropolitan areas in the United States and almost all non-metropolitan areas have no abortion provider. As a result, 8 percent of women who had abortions in the year 2000 were obliged to travel more than 100 miles for the service, while another 16 percent had to travel between 50 and 100 miles.

Women in rural areas are placed at a particular disadvantage by such restrictions. The abortion rate among women in the countryside is half that of women who live in the cities, according to a 2001 survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York.  
 
Parental notification for minors
In the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court expanded the powers of states to enact a wide range of restrictions on access to abortion. Forty-two states have laws requiring parental notification and/or consent for minors seeking abortions.

In addition, a number of state governments have passed laws requiring mandatory waiting periods; placed bans on public funding to clinics that provide abortion; and prohibited insurance plans from covering abortion procedures.

Despite the barriers that have been constructed, it is estimated that one in every three women will have an abortion before they reach the age of 45. Some 1.3 million such procedures were performed in the year 2000.

Since the legalization of abortion the number of women who die each year as a result of an abortion procedure has dramatically declined, from 130 in 1970 down to an average of fewer than 10 a year over the past decade.  
 
Killer of abortion doctor convicted
Meanwhile, James Kopp was convicted on March 18 for the 1998 killing of abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian. Kopp admitted he shot Slepian, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Buffalo, New York, while was in his kitchen with his wife and two of his children.

Claiming he acted because Slepian was "going to kill children the very next day," Kopp pursued a defense of justifiable homicide. His lawyer, Bruce Barket, presented his client as a martyr of the anti-abortion movement.

"If the pro-life movement is going to claim that unborn children are children entitled to rights like anyone else, and they know these children are being brutally and systematically put to death," Barket said, "then simply writing your congressman ends up treating abortion like any other issue. You clearly need to do more than write a check and say a prayer."

Kopp will be sentenced on May 9 and faces 15 years to life in prison. He will also face a federal trial on charges of interfering with the right to an abortion. That charge carries a sentence of 25 years to life.

Slepian’s murder came at the end of a near decade-long campaign of barricades and attacks on health-care facilities and doctors providing abortion.

In the early 1990s the rightist group Operation Rescue began an aggressive campaign to mobilize anti-abortion activists to shut down abortion clinics.

After scoring an early victory in Wichita, Kansas, in 1991 the rightists were pushed back in city after city as they were outmobilized by fighters to defend abortion rights.

In the middle of this confrontation, a half million people marched in Washington, D.C., in April 1992, the largest demonstration ever to defend a woman’s right to choose.
 
 
Related articles:
Abortion rights is key question for working class  
 
 
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