`PARTIAL' ABORTION BAN OK'D.

Byline: Katharine Q. Seelye The New York Times

The Senate passed a bill Tuesday that for the first time would ban a specific abortion procedure, but abortion opponents fell three votes short of the number needed to override an expected veto from President Clinton.

The 64-36 vote represents only incremental progress for abortion opponents. They picked up three Democrats - including Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader - who voted against a similar ban last year. With this shift, they gained some ground in the larger abortion debate, which they have been losing in the courts for more than two decades (Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California voted against the measure).

Sen. Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican who has led the fight for the ban, said after the vote, ``We just need two or three more next time who finally allow their eyes to open up enough to see what the truth of this procedure is all about, and eventually that will happen.''

But Tuesday's debate, in which only a handful of senators spoke, was listless and anticlimactic, and left the political dynamics essentially unchanged - even after abortion opponents brought a full-court press against the procedure, which critics call ``partial-birth abortion'' and doctors call ``intact dilation and evacuation.''

The momentum had seemed on the side of abortion opponents. In the past several months, a dozen states have enacted their own bans on the procedure, in which a fetus is partially delivered and its brain is vacuumed out so the skull can be collapsed and the head can be delivered.

In April, an abortion-rights advocate admitted he had lied about the rarity of the procedure, which he said is performed more frequently and on healthier babies and mothers than he and his colleagues previously had suggested.

In the past few weeks, abortion opponents spent more than $1 million in advertising in eight states to sway potential swing senators, and on the eve of the vote, the prestigious American Medical Association, which had never taken a position on an abortion bill before, endorsed the ban.

Feeling the tide was against them, abortion-rights advocates began the day so dispirited that they mounted no challenge, letting the clock tick during most of their allotted debate time without a single senator on the floor making their case.

In the end, though, the progress by the abortion opponents seemed so small that abortion-rights advocates claimed victory themselves - even as the Senate passed a bill that they viewed as a serious incursion into rights guaranteed by the Supreme Court.

The Senate has never mustered a two-thirds majority against abortion since the Supreme Court legalized it in 1973, although a majority of senators oppose abortion.

And Clinton, who signaled his support for abortion rights with several executive orders the day he took office in 1993, remains constant to that constituency of women who helped elect and re-elect him. The White House on Tuesday reaffirmed Clinton's intention to veto the ban again, saying it still does not provide enough safeguards to protect a woman's health.

Because the Senate changed the bill to win the AMA's endorsement, the measure now goes back to the House, which passed the ban earlier this year with five more votes than needed to override a veto. Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, who called the vote a ``victory for consensus and common sense,'' said Tuesday he expected the Senate to try to override Clinton's veto before the August recess.

``I'd like to wait until we've pursued all avenues and see if we can count the necessary votes,'' Lott said. ``If we can find the votes in a week, I'd like to do it in a week.''