Senate Passes Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act by 63-34 Margin;
Narrowly Approves Non-Binding Pro-Roe Statement
Source: National Right to Life Press Release
Brought to you by: Pro-Life Infonet

Washington, October 21, 1999 -- The U.S. Senate today approved the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act by a lopsided vote of 63-34. The House will take up the bill early next year. President Clinton has successfully vetoed the bill twice before. He threatens a third veto, and today's Senate margin showed Senate support is still two votes short of the two-thirds margin required to override a veto -- a gain of one vote since last year. (Two pro-life senators were absent on today's vote.) "If these 34 senators, Clinton, and Gore get their way, thousands of babies will continue to be pulled feet-first from the womb while alive, and then brutally killed," commented NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson. Earlier, the Senate narrowly adopted an amendment to the bill expressing "the sense of the Congress" that "Roe v. Wade was an appropriate decision and secures an important constitutional right; and such decision should not be overturned."

The amendment, offered by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), passed 51-47, with two senators opposed to the amendment absent. "The Harkin Amendment has no legal effect -- it simply expressed the position of a bare majority of 51 senators, which is hardly a ringing endorsement of legal abortion on demand," said Johnson. "The Harkin Amendment will not survive House and conference committee action on the bill." Some of the 51 senators who voted to endorse Roe may find that the vote returns to haunt them politically, as numerous polls indicate growing support for increased restrictions on abortion. For example, a May 1999 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 58% of the public believed that abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances" or "legal only in a few circumstances."

A July 1998 survey of American women conducted by the Princeton Survey Research Associates for the pro-abortion Center for Gender Equality found that 70% of American women favor "more restrictions" on abortion and 53% believe that abortion should be legal (at most) in cases of rape, incest, or to save the mother's life. The Senate decisively rejected the "phony ban" substitute amendment offered by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il.). This amendment contained multiple overlapping loopholes that would have allowed abortionists to perform partial-birth abortions (or other abortions) at will, even during the final months of pregnancy. "It seems that most of the press has uncritically described the Durbin bill as a ban on late-term abortions, but it is all loophole and no ban -- a purely political gimmick," Johnson said.