Republican Bill Attacks Abortion Rights

Republicans zeroed in on abortion rights Thursday, leading a House vote to reimpose a ban on such operations at overseas military hospitals and pushing a bill that could jail doctors who perform them late in pregnancy.

House lawmakers defeated, 230-196, a Democratic amendment that would have kept abortions legal at the military hospitals. The ban, which President Clinton had lifted by executive order in early 1993, would be reinstated as part of a 1996 defense spending plan the House approved later Thursday. Ten abortions have been performed at those hospitals since the Clinton order.

“Our defense mission is to save lives, not to flat-line brain waves,” said Rep. Robert Dornan, R-Calif., who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination.

While the defense bill was on the House floor, lawmakers in a House Judiciary subcommittee took up a Republican bill that would subject doctors who perform “partial-birth abortions” to fines, up to two years’ imprisonment, or both.

One doctor told the panel he had never heard of a “partial-birth abortion” in 40 years of practice.

“That, I suspect, is because the name did not exist until someone who wanted to ban an abortion procedure made up this erroneous, inflammatory term,” said Dr. J. Courtland Robinson, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Johns Hopkins University Hospital.

Democratic opponents of the measure said its wording was intentionally vague to make doctors cautious about performing any abortion.

“What I think is going to happen is it’s going to be very difficult for us to get high quality docs” willing to perform abortions, said Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo.

The bill was introduced by Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., who chairs the Constitution subcommittee that held the hearing Thursday.

The legislation defines the procedure broadly - without reference to the stage of pregnancy - as “an abortion in which the person performing the abortion partially vaginally delivers a living fetus before killing the fetus and completing the procedure.”