A federal judge in San Francisco on Tuesday declared unconstitutional a law banning what critics call "partial birth abortions," saying the measure was too vaguely worded and placed an undue burden on abortion rights.
US District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton said the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 was also unconstitutional because it lacked an exemption to protect a mother's health.
The decision was hailed by pro-abortion rights groups who saw the law as a first step toward restricting abortions and removing a safe option for some seriously ill women.
But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican and a key backer of the ban, said he was disappointed by the ruling and predicted it would eventually be overturned.
Marc Racicot, chairman of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney election campaign, said, "Today's tragic ruling upholding partial-birth abortion shows why America needs judges who will interpret the law and not legislate from the bench."
Bush signed the law on Nov. 5 last year, criminalizing a procedure that doctors call intact dilation and extraction and critics call partial-birth abortion. The procedure may involve partially removing a fetus from its mother's womb to terminate it.
If the ban ultimately withstands the legal challenges, it would constitute the first federal limit on a type of abortion since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling upholding the right to an abortion. Doctors convicted of performing the procedure could be imprisoned for two years.
Hamilton sided with Planned Parenthood in its lawsuit against the federal government, which had defended the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.
In her ruling, Judge Hamilton barred US Attorney General John Ashcroft from enforcing the law at Planned Parenthood's more than 900 clinics nationwide.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Three sisters from Ohio who inherited a dime kept in a bank vault for more than 40 years knew it had some value, but they had no idea just how much until just a few years ago. The extraordinarily rare coin, struck by the US Mint in San Francisco in 1975, could bring more than US$500,000, said Ian Russell, president of GreatCollections, which specializes in currency and is handling an online auction that ends next month. What makes the dime depicting former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt so valuable is a missing “S” mint mark for San Francisco, one of just two
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