SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge today declared the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional, saying the measure infringes on a woman's right to choose.
The ruling applies to Planned Parenthood clinics and their doctors, who perform roughly half the nation's abortions.
U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton's ruling came in one of three lawsuits challenging the legislation President Bush signed last year.
"The act poses an undue burden on a woman's right to choose an abortion," she wrote.
Federal judges in New York and Nebraska also heard challenges to the law earlier this year but have yet to rule.
Bush signed the bill in November, saying "a terrible form of violence has been directed against children who are inches from birth while the law looked the other way."
In the banned procedure — known as intact dilation and extraction to doctors, but called partial-birth abortion by opponents — the living fetus is partially removed from the womb, and its skull is punctured or crushed.
Justice Department attorneys argued that the procedure is inhumane, causes pain to the fetus and is never medically necessary.
Abortion proponents, however, argued that a woman's health during an abortion is more important than how the fetus is terminated, and that the banned method is often a safer solution that a conventional abortion, in which the fetus is dismembered in the womb and then removed in pieces.
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