“Three federal judges across the breadth of the country have now delivered a stinging rebuke to the potentially far-reaching assault by the White House and Congress on women’s health and reproductive freedom, declaring the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003 to be unconstitutional.

In the latest ruling, last week in Nebraska, Judge Richard Kopf found that the politicians who crafted the statute erred by failing to provide any exception for instances where a woman’s health is at stake – replicating a key defect that led the Supreme Court to invalidate a similar abortion ban in Nebraska in 2000. Judge Kopf, an appointee of President Bush’s father, also presided at the trial stage in that earlier case.

He devoted much of his lengthy new decision to a meticulous review of the extensive, freshly amassed evidence. He refuted Congress’s flimsy legislative ‘finding’ that the ill-defined procedure it bans ‘is never necessary to protect the health of the mother,’ and therefore no exception was needed. Judge Kopf said the evidence, to the contrary, was ‘overwhelming.’ He wrote, ‘In the absence of an exception for the health of a woman, banning the procedure constitutes a significant heath hazard to women.'” (New York Times op-ed)