Last week President Bush signed the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003 into law. This ban is so vaguely worded that it would criminalize necessary abortions done in the case of serious medical conditions, such as if the mother is at risk for strokes, renal failure or complications with diabetes or if the fetus is developing without a brain or spinal cord.
The term “partial birth abortion” is a medical non-entity, and is completely absent from current medical textbooks; it’s used to provoke an emotional response in people. The terms used for the procedures that are closest to what legislators are calling “partial birth abortion” would be dilatation and extraction (D&X), intact dilatation and evacuation (intact D&E) or intrauterine cranial decompression.
The central problem with the law is that it directly hinders a doctor’s capacity to provide the appropriate medical care to a pregnant woman. “Abortion should be a decision between a patient and her physician, without the interference of any third party,” says Lauren Oshman, M.D., M.P.H., and National President of American Medical Student Association (AMSA).
The law is also overly broad and loosely drawn, frequently using terms that are not recognized by the doctors whose conduct the act would criminalize. The procedures that this law will ban purportedly single out only those used in a partial birth abortion, yet the law also describes components of other abortion procedures, according to The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). “Policy further reads that such legislation has the potential to outlaw other abortion techniques that are critical to the lives and health of American women.”
The Guttmacher Institute has reported that partial birth abortions made up less than 1 percent of all the abortions performed last year. This procedure is extremely rare and done only when absolutely necessary, usually under tragic circumstances. This includes instances where women do not know that they are pregnant for several months. One such case was described to the Boston Globe by the executive director of the Four Women clinic in Attleboro, who said, “We’ve had a 12-year-old rape victim who never even had her period. How in the world is she supposed to understand the complexity of her menses and ovulation?”
The new law is the first of its kind to outlaw a specific abortion technique. The ban passed in the Senate with a bipartisan vote, which included eighteen senators who usually support abortion rights. The ACOG has stated that the ban was passed because legislators lacked critical knowledge about the so-called “partial birth abortion” procedure.
Before Roe vs. Wade it was poor women and their families who were disproportionately impacted by the lack of access to legal and safe abortions. According to the Guttmacher Institute a study done in the 1960s showed that 77% of low-income women who had an abortion in New York City attempted a self-induced abortion, with only 2% reporting that a physician had been involved in any way. If we don’t give women who need this procedure a safe and legal option, history has proven that out of desperation they will attempt to terminate a pregnancy illegally. In 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion was just under 200, and illegal abortions accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. The study demonstrates that outlawing abortions has failed as a deterrent and only succeeded at putting more women’s health and safety at risk.
The procedure is used in only extreme situations, which is why only a very tiny percentage of abortions performed annually could be considered partial birth abortions. The act that Bush signed banning the procedure is written so vaguely that it could restrict more than partial birth abortions to include the safest and most common methods used after the first trimester. Outlawing this procedure interferes with the quality of medical care in this country, restricting viable options for those seeking abortions, hampering doctors’ ability to do their jobs, and endangering women’s lives.