First-Ever Federal Ban on Abortion Procedures Endangers Women's Health and Interferes with Medical Practice, the ACLU Says

Statement of Louise Melling, Director, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project

Washington - Congress' passage of the first-ever federal ban on abortion procedures and the president's willingness to make it the law of the land amount to a blatant disregard for women's health and the Constitution.

The American Civil Liberties Union will not accept this affront to women's health and rights. To this end, we are filing a lawsuit today on behalf of the National Abortion Federation (NAF), the professional association of abortion providers in North America, asking the court to block enforcement of this deceptive and extreme measure.

NAF members perform more than half of the abortions provided in this country and work at clinics, doctor's offices, and hospitals throughout the country, including premier teaching hospitals.

As the medical professionals represented in this case attest, this ban dangerously interferes with the doctor-patient relationship. It threatens doctors with criminal penalties for providing the best care possible for their patients. We will not stand by and let doctors throughout the country risk prison for adhering to their best medical judgment.

While the ban's proponents persist in mischaracterizing the scope of this measure, the plain language of the Act makes clear that it prohibits far more than one procedure performed late in pregnancy. Instead, it makes it a crime for doctors to perform the most common and safest abortion procedures used in the second trimester, well before fetal viability.

Additionally, the ban includes no exception to protect women's health, leaving doctors little choice but to risk jail or forsake women in need of critical care.

The ban challenged today is effectively no different from the Nebraska law invalidated by the United States Supreme Court, three years ago. In that case, the Court struck down Nebraska's ban because it was written so broadly as to prohibit the most common procedure used in the second-trimester of pregnancy, and it failed to include a health exception. The current federal ban suffers from the same fatal flaws.

The ACLU filed today's lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of NAF and several individual physicians.