The Bush administration has given the US Justice Department's civil rights division the job of enforcing a contentious new ban on late-term abortions, it emerged yesterday.
The move has provoked furious accusations that the White House is perverting the government's role in promoting civil rights.
In the past, the civil rights division has been instrumental in ensuring black Americans have the right to vote and equal access to housing, while prosecuting hate crimes against minorities.
PHOTO: AP
The ban on late abortions, which was signed into law by President Bush on Wednesday, has become a new legal battleground in the conflict between American liberals and the religious right.
Since the signing, three judges around the country have ordered injunctions that have blocked its enforcement -- paving the way for an eventual showdown in the Supreme Court.
The Justice Department, under the leadership of conservative attorney general John Ashcroft, has vowed to press forward with the enforcement of the law, promising in a statement released this week "to strongly defend the law prohibiting partial-birth abortions using every resource necessary."
But Mr Ashcroft's decision to use the department's civil rights division, rather than its criminal division, to enforce the measure has brought together two of the most emotionally charged issues in contemporary America: abortion and race.
In a letter to Ashcroft, Democratic members of the House of Representatives judiciary committee accused him of perverting the federal government's role in promoting civil rights.
"Your decision is a slap in the face of the civil rights community, and does a grave disservice to the many Americans who gave their lives for the cause of civil rights laws in this country," the letter says.
"It is Orwellian that you would have the civil rights division enforce a law which has been essentially found by the Supreme Court to violate the civil rights of millions of American women."
The use of the division is profoundly symbolic for another reason.
The anti-abortion lobby argues that a fetus is a person who is entitled to civil rights. The current law on abortion -- defined by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling Roe v Wade -- says a fetus does not have such rights.
Women's rights organizations suspect that the ban on late abortions is the first step in a campaign to reverse Roe v Wade.
The measure bans a particular procedure in which fetuses in the late stages of pregnancy are aborted by partially delivering them and then puncturing their skull.
Critics of the ban point out that it makes no exceptions for late abortions to protect the life or health of the mother.
Ones hour after Bush signed the bill on Wednesday, a judge in Nebraska ruled that the law could be unconstitutional because it did not provide adequate safeguards for mothers.
He disagreed with the justice department's argument that doctors "uniformly agreed that a partial-birth abortion is never necessary to advance the health or life of women."
The Nebraska judge ruled instead that the medical evidence was inconclusive.
On Thursday, judges in New York and San Francisco issued similar rulings.
In California, Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled that the law appeared unconstitutional because it provided no exemptions for a woman's health.
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