Partial Birth Abortion Act Ruled Unconstitutional by U.S. Courts
By JULIA PRESTON

Two federal appeals courts yesterday upheld rulings that the Partial Birth Abortion Act, passed by Congress in 2003 but barred by the courts, is unconstitutional because it does not include an exception when the health of a pregnant woman is at risk.

The rulings, which came on the same day from three-judge panels in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, and the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, were substantially based on a United States Supreme Court decision in a Nebraska case in 2000. In that case, the Supreme Court found that any abortion ban must include an exception allowing a procedure that involves a partly delivered fetus after the first trimester of pregnancy, known among opponents as partial birth abortion, when alternative methods could endanger the woman's health.

Since the appeals court for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, reached a similar conclusion last July, the three legal challenges nationwide to the abortion act have now been affirmed on appeal. This month the Supreme Court several times postponed deciding whether to hear the Eighth Circuit case. The rest