Senate Votes To Lift Military Abort Ban

Taking up what has become an annual abortion fight, the Senate voted Friday to lift a ban on women using personal funds to obtain an abortion at military hospital overseas.

The House, however, last month rejected for a seventh straight year an attempt to end the prohibition, and the two chambers must address the issue when they meet to work out differences on a $393 billion defense bill for next year.

The Senate vote was 52-40.

Opponents said the provision allowing abortions, if left in the bill that approves defense spending programs for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, could effectively prevent it from clearing Congress and going to the president for his signature.

But supporters, led by Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Patty Murray, D-Wash., argued that it was unfair that women serving their country overseas were denied the rights to a safe and legal abortion available to women at home.

It is ironic, said Snowe, that women "who are on the front line and defending us in this war on terrorism ... are least protected in terms of the right to make choices."

The House last month rejected a similar amendment to the defense bill for a seventh straight year, by a generally party-line 215-202 vote. The last Senate vote, in 2000, was 50-49 against lifting the ban.

Opponents argued that taxpayer-funded military facilities shouldn't be used for abortions, even those that are privately paid for. It's "very harmful, wrong, that we would hold America's armed services hostage to abortion politics," said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.

The use of federal funds for abortions at military hospitals has been banned since 1979. In 1988 the Reagan administration extended that ban to personally funded abortions. In 1993 President Clinton lifted the ban, but Congress overturned that decision in the 1996 defense bill.

Exceptions to the ban are made when the life of the mother is endangered, in which case the government will pay for the abortion, and for rape and incest, when the mother can pay for an abortion at a military hospital.

But Murray argued that this still deprives the 100,000 military women and dependents stationed overseas of a basic right enjoyed by women at home.

She said military women seeking an abortion must obtain approval from their commanding officer for leave to travel back to the United States, a process that compromises a woman's privacy rights. The other alternative is to obtain an abortion in the host country, where doctors may not speak English and may lack the training of American doctors, she said.