Bush signs Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the first federal statute to ban a specific abortion procedure since Roe v. Wade

On November 5, 2003, President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, making it the first federal statute to prohibit a specific abortion procedure since Roe v. Wade thirty years earlier. The House passed the bill 281-142 and the Senate 64-34. Unlike the Nebraska law struck down in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), the federal Act did not include a health exception for the mother — a deliberate omission designed to create a new Supreme Court test. Federal district courts in three separate circuits immediately blocked enforcement. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the law in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), with Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority finding that Congress could act where medical opinion was divided, effectively reversing Stenberg's health-exception requirement.