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WASHINGTON — In its first abortion ruling in six years, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision Wednesday that reaffirmed the need to include an exception for medical emergencies in a law that restricts teenagers' access to abortion.

The decision told a lower court to reconsider its ruling that struck down, in its entirety, a New Hampshire law that fails to include such an exception.

"We try to limit the solution to the problem," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said in her opinion for the court, instructing the lower court to consider invalidating the law only as it applies to those few teenagers who need an immediate abortion for medical reasons.

"We do not revisit our abortion precedents today," O'Connor declared in the opening words of what is likely to be her last opinion for the court. The 10-page opinion sidestepped the abortion debate that has been such a prominent feature of public discourse about the court's future.

The hiatus may be brief, however. At their conference on Friday, the justices are scheduled to take up the Bush administration's appeal of a lower-court ruling that declared unconstitutional a federal law, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

That case, on which the court had deferred action until the New Hampshire case was decided, presents issues that may not be so easily avoided.

Further, the federal case, if the court agrees to hear it, would be argued after O'Connor retires. She was part of the 5-4 majority that struck down a Nebraska precursor of the federal law in 2000, so her successor, likely to be Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., could be in a position to cast the deciding vote.

In the New Hampshire decision Wednesday, the justices accepted the finding by two lower federal courts that the New Hampshire law was constitutionally deficient in not making explicit provisions for pregnant teenagers facing a medical emergency. The law requires notice to a parent, followed by a 48-hour waiting period, before a doctor can perform an abortion on a girl under 18.

Where the justices differed from the U.S. District Court in Concord, N.H., and the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Boston, was on how to remedy the absence of a medical-emergency provision. The lower courts had barred enforcement of the entire statute, even for the great majority of teenagers for whom the lack of an exception is not relevant.

The choice of this "most blunt remedy" was unjustified, O'Connor said, when a "more finely drawn" remedy might be more consistent with the intent of the Legislature, which passed the law in 2003.

Consequently, the Supreme Court vacated the appeals court's decision and ordered it to examine which option the Legislature would have preferred: a statute with an emergency exception, or no enforceable parental-notice law at all.

"We try not to nullify more of a legislature's work than is necessary," O'Connor said, adding that "the touchstone for any decision about remedy is legislative intent."

● State House health panel votes on abortion motion / A4