For the first time since the fateful Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973, Congress this week moved to prohibit one type of abortion.

The House on Wednesday voted 288-139 to ban partial-birth abortions. The bill faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, but Wednesday's vote was important. Not only does it mark the first time Congress has inveighed against the orthodoxy of abortion rights, but it helps illustrate the zealotry of the pro-abortion camp.

Several hundred late-term, partial-birth abortions are performed each year, a small number in relation to the more than one million abortions annually.

The procedure involves the doctor pulling the baby by the legs through the birth canal until only the head remains inside the womb, then sticking a scissors in the skull and sucking out the brains so the head can pass out of the body.

Sometimes the anesthesia administered to the mother kills the baby before the gruesome procedure. Sometimes the baby's alive when the abortionist stabs it in the head with the scissors.

Apparently the distinction is unimportant to the Roe vs. Wade apologists. They argue that partial-birth abortions are used only in late-term pregnancies where the life of the mother is in danger or severe fetal abnormalities are found. Of course there are other ways to save a mother, and the House bill allows for exceptions when a mother's life is at risk.

The bill is little more than a laudable attempt at only perfunctory restrictions on the unbridled butchery of abortion.

You would think, given his campaign rhetoric that he would work to make abortions "safe, legal and rare," President Clinton would welcome the token restraint.

Instead, his spokesman said this week Clinton is reluctant to sign the bill. Others aren't merely reluctant, they're downright cross.

"As a woman today standing in this chamber, I feel like I'm in a chamber of horrors," said Rep. Pat Schroeder of Colorado. With such a gift for hyperbole, I wonder how Ms. Schroeder would describe a womb as it's being assailed by anesthesia, clamps and scissors? A fun house?

John Bryant, D-Texas, justified his opposition to the House bill this way: "We are really not talking here today about a procedure," he said. "We are talking about Roe vs. Wade and about the right of a woman and her ability to have children in the future."

So that's what Roe vs. Wade is all about: allowing abortions so that women can have children later on. We've come full circle. Abortion backers now can oppose abortion curbs on behalf of the woman's right to have children sometime in the future.

Why can't people just be honest about abortion? Either an unborn child has a right to develop and grow inside the womb until labor brings her into the world -- regardless of whether she is wanted, handicapped or unattractive -- or the mother has the right to stop a beating heart and purge the child from her womb.

It's interesting that we don't question the unborn child's rights when they agree with the mother's wishes. If a happily expectant mom loses her baby -- interesting, isn't it, that we don't refer to it as a fetus or unviable tissue mass when the baby's wanted -- through someone else's negligence, she is entitled to civil and criminal redress. If an expectant friend suffers a miscarriage, we grieve with her.

But when she decides she doesn't want to be a mom, she can hire a doctor to snuff out the budding life in her womb. The law says we can't stop her. Society says we can't condemn her infallible choice. It is crass to grieve for the throw-away baby.

It's tough to change the law, because a majority of nine unelected judges say it's in the Constitution. Not directly there, mind you, but in the shadowy space between the lines -- in the penumbras.

And the first time Congress attempts to pierce a tiny chink in the abortion-on-demand bulwark, the worshipers of choice raise their shameful din of objection.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.