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House passes ban on abortion procedure
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4-10-2000 Washington. For the third time in as many congresses, the House of Representatives passed a bill last week that would ban partial-birth abortions, a procedure in which a fetus is extracted and aborted near the end of pregnancy. The vote of 287-141 is enough to override a promised veto from President Clinton. The bill, however, is virtually certain not to become law this year because the Senate, which passed its own version last October, fell four votes short of the needed two-thirds margin. That, plus the fact that the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments later this month on a case to assess the constitutionality of a similar ban in Nebraska, led opponents of the bill to charge that House leaders were bringing it up for purely partisan reasons. "This is a bill in search of a veto for political purposes," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. Backers of the measure, however, said keeping the debate open is an important way to gather support. "This act [the procedure] has no place in a civilized society," said Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala. Rep. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who is running for the Michigan Senate and who has been the subject of criticism for her failure to support the ban, said she found it offensive that people think women "in the final weeks of pregnancy would just have a bad day and decide to get rid of" a pregnancy. Opponents of the measure – who say the bill is written so vaguely that it would bar far more than the dilation and extraction procedure its sponsors say is its intent—cried foul that they were not allowed to offer a substitute amendment. The bill now must be reconciled with the version that passed in the Senate. While the two are nearly identical, the Senate measure includes an amendment expressing the "sense of the Senate" that the Supreme Court acted correctly in establishing the right to abortion in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade case.
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