What follows is a press release from the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) in Washington, D.C., issued Thursday, July 11, 2002, at 3 p.m. ET. For further information, visit www.nrlc.org or call NRLC Department of Federal Legislation, 202-626-8820.

WASHINGTON – A subcommittee of the House of Representatives today approved, on a party-line vote, a new bill to place a national ban on partial-birth abortions. Supporters of the bill hope for approval by the full House Judiciary Committee and by the full House later this month. Congress has approved such bans twice before, but they were vetoed by President Clinton in 1996 and 1997. On each occasion, the House voted to override the vetoes, but supporters fell short of the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate.

President Bush supports a ban on partial-birth abortion. But the prospects for the bill in the Senate are unclear. The last time the Senate dealt with the partial-birth abortion issue, on October 21, 1999, 63 senators voted to pass the ban, and two additional senators who supported it were absent, for a total of 65.

"We will soon learn whether Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle will allow the Senate to pass the ban on partial-birth abortions and send it to President Bush," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC).

In June, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling in Stenberg v. Carhart, struck down a Nebraska law that was similar to the proposed federal ban. In response to that ruling, the new federal bill (H.R. 4965) more explicitly defines a prohibited partial-birth abortion as one in which "the person performing the abortion deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother," and then kills the baby. The bill also contains congressional findings that the method is never necessary to protect women's health and indeed is inherently dangerous to women.

Justice Clarence Thomas accurately described the partial-birth abortion method in his dissent in Carhart: "After dilating the cervix, the physician will grab the fetus by its feet and pull the fetal body out of the uterus into the vaginal cavity. At this stage of development, the head is the largest part of the body. . . . the head will be held inside the uterus by the woman's cervix. While the fetus is stuck in this position, dangling partly out of the woman's body, and just a few inches from a completed birth, the physician uses an instrument such as a pair of scissors to tear or perforate the skull. The physician will then either crush the skull or will use a vacuum to remove the brain and other intracranial contents from the fetal skull, collapse the fetus' head, and pull the fetus from the uterus."

In 1997, pro-abortion advocates conceded that most partial-birth abortions are performed on healthy unborn babies carried by healthy women in the fifth and sixth months of pregnancy; some are performed even later.

For further documentation on partial-birth abortion, see www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/index.html. Among the documents that may be particularly useful are "Key Facts on Partial-Birth Abortion" (www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/KeyfactsJune02.html), and NRLC's detailed, footnoted congressional testimony of March 11, 1997 (www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/test.html).

The National Right to Life Committee is the nation's largest pro-life group with affiliates in all 50 states and over 3,000 chapters nationwide. National Right to Life works through legislation and education to protect those lives threatened by abortion, infanticide and euthanasia.

VSHL is the Virginia affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee.