Signing of ban doesn't stop late-term abortion dispute

The government vows to "vigorously defend" the law, but a challenge is likely headed to the Supreme Court.

By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. Nov. 24, 2003.

As the ink dried on the newly signed law commonly known as the "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act," physicians and women's advocacy groups succeeded in getting three federal courts to issue temporary restraining orders against the ban on intact dilatation and extraction.

The first court decision came in Nebraska less than an hour after President Bush signed the bill, which carries a two-year prison sentence for doctors who perform the procedure.

"The government should stay out of the doctor's office," said New York obstetrician-gynecologist William H. Knorr, MD, who along with three other physicians succeeded in getting a temporary restraining order in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska.

"They came up with the HIPAA laws to protect patient privacy, and on the other hand, they intrude on a woman's right to make a decision and on her physician's right to carry out that decision for her or to refer her to someone who can," Dr. Knorr said.

Ob-gyn LeRoy Carhart, MD, who led the fight against a similar Nebraska ban that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional in 2000, agreed.

"As an abortion provider, it is my duty to use the safest procedures I have available once a patient decides to terminate her pregnancy. In America, abortion is one of the safest of all surgical procedures performed by doctors," Dr. Carhart said in a statement. He also is a plaintiff in the case filed in the Nebraska federal court. "Like the Nebraska law, this criminal ban will frighten doctors away from offering the medical services that are best for their patients."