Abortion rights activists gathered on Wednesday evening at the Ferry Street Bridge to protest the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, which was signed into law on Wednesday by President George W. Bush.
Planned Parenthood helped sponsor the event, in which activists waved a series of signs at rush hour traffic that read: “Politicians playing doctor is hazardous to women’s health.”
Kitty Piercy, public affairs director for the Planned Parenthood Health Services of Southwestern Oregon, said the protest went well, adding that all of the students who participated were vital.
“It’s an expression of how many people are not happy with this law being passed,” she said.
Oregon Right to Life Executive Director Gayle Atteberry applauded the new law.
“We’re very pleased the bill is passed and signed,” Atteberry said. “This abortion procedure is gruesome and brutal, and above all is not needed.”
The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban is the first major setback for abortion rights activists since the controversial U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade affirmed abortion rights 30 years ago.
With President Bush’s signature of approval on the bill, it is now illegal for a doctor to abort a pregnancy by partially delivering the fetus and then killing it. While there are no general health exclusions to the law, there is an exception when the mother’s life is endangered.
Piercy said Planned Parenthood believes the law will be found unconstitutional because there is no general health exception.
The Supreme Court struck down a similar law in Nebraska in 2000, mainly because the law failed to offer an exception for pregnancies that threatened the mother’s health.
Atteberry said it is important to exclude the term “general health” from the law because that could include everything from emotional health to physical well-being.
The bill defines a “partial-birth abortion” as an abortion in which “a physician deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living, unborn child’s body until either the entire baby’s head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the baby’s trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother and only the head remains inside the womb, for the purpose of performing an overt act — usually the puncturing of the back of the child’s skull and removing the baby’s brains — that the person knows will kill the partially delivered infant, performs this act, and then completes the delivery of the dead infant.”
The bill claims that “partial-birth abortions” should be outlawed for the following reasons: The procedure is never medically necessary to preserve the health of the mother; it is unrecognized as a valid abortion procedure by the mainstream medical community; it poses additional health risks to the mother; it blurs the line between abortion and infanticide and it confuses the role of the physician in childbirth.
According to the Oregon Department of Human Services, 13,172 abortions were performed in Oregon last year. Of those, 86 percent were during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and 94 percent were during the first 16 weeks of pregnancy. The “partial-birth abortion” technique described in the law is not used until 20 weeks into a pregnancy.
Atteberry said she felt that if a mother is going to partially deliver a child and kill it, then the mother should fully deliver the child and have it adopted.
Piercy said she felt that abortion should be a decision left for women, not politicians.
A federal judge in Nebraska has already issued a temporary restraining order against enforcement of the new law, protecting four doctors who filed a lawsuit. The order does not protect any other doctors or clinics.