MIDWEST

JUDGE FINDS ABORTION BAN UNCONSTITUTIONAL

LINCOLN, Neb. – A third federal judge has ruled the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional, adding judicial weight that some experts say could keep the issue from reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf of Lincoln ruled against the measure yesterday, saying Congress ignored the most experienced doctors when it determined that the banned procedure would never be necessary to protect the health of the mother – a finding he called “unreasonable.”

His ruling echoed decisions by federal judges in New York and San Francisco. The abortion ban was signed last year by President Bush but was not enforced because the three judges agreed to hear constitutional challenges in simultaneous non-jury trials.

The ban, which President Clinton twice had vetoed, was seen by abortion rights activists as a fundamental departure from the Supreme Court’s 1973 precedent in Roe v. Wade. But the Bush administration has argued that the so-called partial birth procedure is cruel and unnecessary and causes pain to the fetus.

If each judge is upheld by federal appeals courts, the high court might not take up the issue, said Pricilla Smith, a lawyer with the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights.

“If all the appellate courts uphold those decisions, there is no reason for it to go to the Supreme Court,” Smith said.

Not everyone agreed. “It’s very unusual for the court not to take a case where an act of Congress has been struck down,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, which supports the ban. “I would be very surprised if the court took a pass on this.”

– Associated Press

NORTHEAST

CLINTON MOVED FROM INTENSIVE CARE FOLLOWING SURGERY

President Clinton was moved yesterday from intensive care to a hospital room following his heart surgery, his office said. Mr. Clinton walked with assistance, sat up in bed, and sat in a chair while continuing to recover from surgery he had Monday to bypass four severely clogged arteries, the office said in a statement posted on his Web site.

Mr. Clinton will continue to recuperate in the hospital for the next several days, his office said. He had planned to campaign for Senator Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, but his recovery will take him off the stump – at least for now – with just eight weeks left until the election.

Hundreds of get-well cards were delivered to the former president’s Harlem office yesterday from members of AmeriCorps, the domestic volunteer program he created in 1994. He’s also received bags of mail at the hospital and more than 70,000 messages from well-wishers on his foundation’s Web site. Senator Clinton has canceled her public schedule for the next few days as her husband recovers. Doctors performing the four-hour quadruple bypass operation found that Mr.Clinton’s heart disease was extensive, with blockages in some arteries well over 90% – making it likely that he would have had a substantial heart attack in the near future. The 58-year-old former president went to the hospital late last week after complaining of prolonged chest pain and shortness of breath, but doctors revealed Monday that he’d had these symptoms for several months. They said he had blamed them on lapses in his exercise routine and acid reflux.

In bypass surgery, doctors remove one or more blood vessels from elsewhere in the body and attach them to arteries serving the heart, detouring around blockages.

– Associated Press

HEALTH

STUDY: DIRTY AIR LOWERS LUNG CAPACITY

New research shows that teenagers who grow up in heavy air pollution have reduced lung capacity, putting them at risk for illness and premature death as adults.

In the longest study to date of pollution’s impact on developing lungs, University of Southern California researchers followed children raised in communities around Los Angeles – some very polluted, some not – for eight years.

They found about 8% of 18-year-olds had lung capacity less than 80% of normal, compared with about 1.5% of those in communities with the least pollution. “What they found here, until they find otherwise, I would expect would apply to other cities,” said Patrick Breysse, director of the Division of Environmental Health Engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was not involved in the study.

The effects were the same for boys or girls, and whether or not the children had asthma or smoked. The study was reported in today’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The researchers studied 1,759 children in 12 Southern California communities from spring 1993 through spring 2001, testing their lung capacity annually between ages 10 and 18, when lungs grow substantially and reach full capacity.

-Associated Press