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Change your Life! |
Nebraska law at center of U.S. abortion debate |
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April 25, 2000
LINCOLN, Nebraska, APR 24 (AP) - When Nebraska lawmakers passed a bill in 1997 banning so-called partial-birth abortions, Sen. Ernie Chambers knew the issue was far from resolved.
The unicameral Legislature's senior member cast the lone vote against its passage and warned his colleagues that the measure would fail to pass constitutional muster.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Nebraska's ban - its first major case dealing with abortion rights in eight years.
People on both sides of the issue say the court's decision will either safeguard or significantly erode abortion rights in the United States.
"What is at stake ... is whether the court will extend the right to abortion outside the womb to encompass the killing of children who are partially delivered," said James Bopp, general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee.
Janet Benshoof of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy takes the opposite view:
"The Supreme Court will determine whether states have the right to force a woman to sacrifice her life and health to promote an extremist political agenda to outlaw abortion outright," she said.
"Partial-birth abortion" is not a medical term, it is the term used by abortion opponents. Nebraska's law defines the banned procedure as "partially delivering vaginally a living unborn child before killing the unborn child and completing the delivery."
Nebraska Attorney General Don Stenberg, who is using the case as the cornerstone of his U.S. Senate campaign, plans to argue that the ban is limited to a procedure doctors call D-and-X, or dilation and extraction, which involves cutting the skull of a fetus and draining its contents before extracting it.
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