By Catholic News Service
(From the issue of 6/9/05)

RICHMOND, Va. — Catholic officials criticized a federal court's ruling that a Virginia ban on the partial-birth abortion procedure is unconstitutional because it does not include an exception to protect a woman's health.

Gail Quinn, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, said the court's "overturning this law makes it painfully clear that even infanticide cannot be banned in the United States."

In a 2-1 decision June 3, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond upheld a ruling by a federal judge last year on the 2003 Virginia law, which made it a felony to perform a partial-birth abortion. The date the law was to take effect was blocked by the lawsuit challenging it.

Arlington Bishop Paul S. Loverde said the "unspeakably gruesome procedure of partial-birth abortion has taken the lives of innocent children — just inches from birth and full protection by the law." He urged Catholics and all people of good will "to continue pursuing a ban to this procedure and a restoration of legal protection to all unborn children."

The two judges who ruled against the Virginia law said they based their decision on a 2000 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a similar Nebraska law banning partial-birth abortions because it did not contain a health exception.

"Because the Virginia act does not contain an exception for circumstance when the banned abortion procedures are necessary to preserve a woman's health, we affirm the summary judgment order declaring the act unconstitutional on its face," Judge M. Blane Michael wrote in the majority opinion.

Judge Paul V. Niemeyer in his dissent said that the Virginia statute differs substantially from the Nebraska law and called the majority opinion a bold move that, "in essence, constitutionalizes infanticide of a most gruesome nature."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York law firm, filed the legal challenge to the Virginia partial-birth abortion ban, saying that the state law was written so broadly that it could ban other abortion procedures.

Bishop Loverde in a June 8 statement said the court's ruling demonstrates how "wrongly decided cases, such as Roe vs. Wade, often spawn more wrongly decided cases, such as the present matter."

"Just as one wrong turn can lead a driver to stray completely from his original path, Roe and its progeny show how a bad decision begets more bad decisions," he added.

Jeff Caruso, executive director of the Virginia Catholic Conference, the lobbying arm of the state's bishops, said the court's decision was "one of disappointment."

"We're talking about a child that is merely inches from birth and the medical community has not identified any instances where (partial-birth abortion) would be needed to protect a women's health," he told Catholic News Service June 8.

Caruso noted that if the Virginia General Assembly would enact another measure to ban partial-birth abortions, the Virginia Catholic Conference would support it.