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April 5, 2004

Reproductive Rights Assaulted

At a bill-signing ceremony at the White House, and in federal courtrooms across the country, the Republican campaign against women's basic reproductive and privacy rights reached an ominous new stage last week.

In Washington on Thursday, President Bush signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which advances the administration's anti-choice agenda under the guise of law enforcement. Like numerous similar state laws, the new federal law makes it a criminal act to harm a fetus, separate from the crime of attacking a pregnant woman.

Meanwhile, trials opened in New York, Nebraska and California in the cases challenging the constitutionality of the federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortion. Early testimony by doctors powerfully underscored the law's core defects — namely, the glaring absence of an adequate exception to protect a woman's health and its astonishingly broad reach. Although billed as a prohibition on late-term abortions, its actual wording would criminalize common abortion procedures used after the first trimester of pregnancy, but well before fetal viability.

Dr. LeRoy Carhart, the Nebraska physician who won the Supreme Court decision striking down a similar state ban three years ago, testified that the new law covers "at least 21 different procedures." But he said, "In reality I think this act covers everything after the 12th week" of pregnancy.

Testifying in the New York case, Dr. Amos Grunebaum of New York Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical College expressed similar concerns. He also noted that the removal of an intact fetus, which the bill supposedly takes aim at, is sometimes the safest procedure, since it is less invasive, thereby reducing the risk of infection and other complications.

The administration's defense of its "partial birth" ban and the new "unborn victims" law have a common theme: profound disrespect for women.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company