Republicans poised for anti-abortion victory in Senate

Cheered on by the religious right, the new Republican leadership in the US Senate is hoping to ban a rare form of late-term abortion usually only performed when the mother is in danger or the child is likely to die soon after birth.

The ban, thanks to November's Republican election victory, now looks likely to muster enough votes in the Senate to be filibuster-proof. That would be an enormous symbolic victory for the anti-abortion lobby after years of argument, legislative wrangling and legal battles waged all the way to the Supreme Court.

"This is the beginning of the end, hopefully, of a very long journey for a piece of legislation we've been debating for more than seven years," the Republican Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the chief sponsor of the bill, said as a final debate in the chamber began.

The campaign against so-called partial-birth abortions – the terminology itself is highly contentious – has been high on the political agenda since a new generation of more right-wing, more religiously inspired Republicans swept into Congress in the 1994 mid-term elections. The ban was approved twice in the 1990s but vetoed by President Bill Clinton. It surfaced again last year, but did not make it past the Democratic leadership.

According to medical experts, including the American College of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians (ACGO), the procedure in the third trimester is rare and almost always performed either to protect the mother's health or to spare her the trauma of continuing a pregnancy when the child is severely deformed and likely to die shortly after birth.

The ACGO has argued that the language used in proposed legislation is unscientific and risks restricting a woman's constitutional right to opt for abortion much earlier in her pregnancy. The technical term for the procedure is "dilation and extraction", which involves crushing the foetus as it is removed, but the legislation includes language that is "overly broad and imprecisely drawn", the ACGO has said.

About 30 states, also under the influence of the religious right, have attempted to ban "partial-birth" abortions, but have been told twice by the Supreme Court that their legislation is unconstitutional.

Congressional leaders say the law they are now contemplating has been rewritten to take account of the Supreme Court's objections, something pro-abortion advocates contest. Any new law is sure to be subject to fresh legal challenges and will almost certainly go to the Supreme Court.

Arguably more important than the legislation itself, which would affect an estimated 0.15 per cent of abortions performed in the United States, is its political symbolism. The Bush administration – which draws on the religious right for a large part of its support – has indicated it is in favour of a ban, which it describes as "morally imperative and constitutionally permissible". That the "partial-birth" ban is being rushed through the Senate while debate on the looming war with Iraq is absent also says something about the Republican leadership's priorities

The bill could still be derailed by a last-minute amendment. It declares that "partial-birth" procedures are never necessary for a woman's health – something liberal Democratscontest. Key to the bill's passage will be a small number of Democratic Senators from conservative states who are inclined to support the legislation for their own political reasons.