http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11115610/
Appellate courts: abortion law unconstitutional
Panels across country call federal law banning 'partial-birth' abortion
vague
Updated: 4:21 p.m. ET Jan. 31, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO - Two federal appeals courts on opposite sides of the
country declared the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional
Tuesday, saying the measure is vague and lacks an exception for cases in
which a woman’s health is at stake.
The first ruling came from a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals. Hours later, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan issued a similar decision,
affirming a 2004 ruling by a judge who upheld the right to perform a
type of late-term abortion even as he described the procedure as
“gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized.”
The law, signed in 2003, banned a procedure known to doctors as intact
dilation and extraction and called partial-birth abortion by abortion
foes. The fetus is partially removed from the womb, and the skull is
punctured or crushed.
President Bush signed the abortion ban in 2003, but it was not enforced
because of legal challenges in several states.
The ban covers a procedure generally performed in the second trimester,
in which a fetus is partially removed from the womb and the skull
punctured.
A federal judge in Nebraska also has ruled the ban unconstitutional. The
Nebraska ruling was upheld in July by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals, and has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Tuesday’s decisions were also expected to be appealed to the high court.
The ban, which President Clinton twice vetoed, was seen by abortion
rights activists as a fundamental departure from the Supreme Court’s
1973 precedent in Roe v. Wade. But the Bush administration has argued
that the procedure is cruel and unnecessary and causes pain to the
fetus.
© 2006 The Associated Press
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Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a cornucopia of splinters.
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