Court strikes down state ban on abortion method

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that a Virginia law banning an abortion procedure was unconstitutional because it infringed on a woman's right to end her pregnancy.

The 2-1 decision by the appeals court based in Richmond, Virginia, was a victory for abortion rights advocates who had challenged the 2003 law that bans what it terms "partial birth infanticide."

The U.S. Supreme Court last year upheld a federal law, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, saying it prohibited only a clearly defined method. It marked the first time the court has ever upheld a nationwide ban on a specific abortion procedure.

But the appeals court ruled the Virginia law was substantially broader than the federal law and must be struck down because it would burden a woman's right to choose an abortion as early as the second trimester of pregnancy.

While the federal law protected doctors who set out to perform a legal abortion that by accident becomes the banned procedure, the Virginia law provided no such protection, the appeals court said.

Both sides in the case agreed that the Virginia law bans a medical procedure called "intact dilation and extraction."

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, which brought the challenge to the law, hailed the ruling.

"Federal courts are seeing through these thinly veiled attempts to undermine a woman's ability to obtain an abortion," she said in a statement, noting that a federal appeals court last year struck down a broad Michigan abortion ban.

Critics had charged the Virginia law, which has never taken effect, was one of the most restrictive abortion measures in the country.

(Reporting by James Vicini, Editing by Deborah Charles)