WASHINGTON - The House voted yesterday to overturn President Clinton's five-month-old veto of legislation that would outlaw a contentious technique to end pregnancies in their late stages, putting the emotionally charged issue in the political spotlight just six weeks before Election Day.
The 285 to 137 vote - four more votes than needed for the two-thirds majority required - was a largely symbolic victory for anti-abortion forces, as the Senate is unlikely to muster a similar majority to enact the measure into law over Clinton's objections when it votes next week.
"I suspect it will be hard to override it," Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said yesterday.
But the vote's political significance is much larger, as it allows Republicans to portray Clinton as an extremist on the question of the abortion procedure, which polls show is opposed by a large majority of Americans. On the campaign trail, GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole has pounded away at his support for the ban and Clinton's veto of it.
The measure would outlaw what it calls a "partial-birth abortion," the term anti-abortion forces have given a procedure in which a woman's birth canal is widened and the fetus is removed feet first until only the head remains in the woman's uterus. A doctor may collapse the fetus's skull so that the head can be drawn through the birth canal.
The bill would subject doctors who perform the procedure to fines and up to two years in prison. In addition, it would allow the fetus's father and, if the woman is younger than 18, the woman's parents to sue the doctor. The only exception would be if no other procedure would save the woman's life.
Clinton vetoed the measure in April, saying he would accept the legislation if it included an exception to protect the woman's health, a term the Supreme Court has held includes "all factors - physical, emotional, psychological, familial and the woman's age - relevant to the well-being of the patient."
That language is so broad that it "makes any ban virtually meaningless," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), one of Congress' most ardent abortion foes.
"President Clinton did all he could to make sure partial-birth abortions keep happening," said Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.), the bill's sponsor. "President Clinton went too far. With this veto, he showed all of us just how extreme he is on the issue of abortion."
Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, said the vote should bolster Dole's campaign. "This demonstrates that President Clinton's true vulnerability is not on the economy, but on social and character issues," he said. "Abortion has always been thought of as a weakness for Republicans, but this indicates it is a weakness for the Democrats."
Yesterday's vote served another important political purpose for Republicans by bringing anti-abortion GOP lawmakers and many longtime supporters of support abortion rights together on the same side, opposing the abortion procedure.
"Virtually every pro-choice American and every pro-life American agrees that aborting a child in the eighth or ninth month the way a partial-birth abortion does is wrong," House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said earlier this week.
House Democrats pointed to the delay in acting on the president's veto - even though these types of abortions continued to be performed - as proof of the Republicans' political motives.
"You sat here until election eve because you weren't concerned about the procedure, you were concerned with gaining political advantage," Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told his GOP colleagues.
The political significance of the vote was underscored by the massive advertising campaigns launched on both sides of the issue.
Since Clinton vetoed the bill in April, several anti-abortion groups sent out mass mailings to mobilize supporters. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which held a prayer vigil with its eight U.S. cardinals at the Capitol last week, sent out 8 million postcards opposing the veto and the National Right to Life Campaign sent out 9 million brochures with information about the procedure. On the other side, Planned Parenthood ran television advertisements with a woman who said the procedure was necessary to save her health.
Not only is the issue emotionally wrenching, it is one where there are few hard facts or statistics. Abortion-rights activists say the procedure is used rarely and only is cases when severe defects - such as anenchphaly, the absence of brain development - or conditions threatening the woman's life are discovered too late in pregnancy to use most other techniques. Anti-abortion activists argue that the procedure is used to perform elective abortions.
In fact, there are no reliable statistics on how many abortions are done each year in this manner. Neither is there much information about the women who undergo the procedure or about the condition of the fetuses they carry. The procedure is one of many used to end pregnancies that are more than half over. A normal pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks. Such abortions represent only 1.3 percent of the 1.3 million abortions performed each year in the United States.