The Senate on Tuesday rebuffed the first attempt to alter bipartisan compromise legislation to fight AIDS and other diseases overseas, rejecting an amendment to give it more focus.

The Senate voted, 70-24, to table, or kill, the amendment from Jim DeMint , R-S.C., to limit the five-year, $50 billion bill to 15 poor countries where it already operates.

The bill would reauthorize and expand President Bush’s 2003 initiative to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria overseas.

The vote also effectively dismissed a second-degree amendment by DeMint that would have brought abortion into the debate. The amendment would have explicitly barred funding from overseas groups that support “coercive abortion and forced sterilization.”

“This vote is about whether the Senate will allow American tax dollars to go to organizations that provide or support forced abortions in China, which is absolutely outrageous and must be stopped,” DeMint said before the vote.

DeMint said the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has given money to Chinese agencies that perform such activities. The United States is the largest donor to the Global Fund, for which the bill would authorize $2 billion in fiscal 2009.

Existing law allows the administration to prohibit aid to such groups and it has blocked funding for the United Nations Population Fund because of its work in China. The 2003 AIDS law exempted the Global Fund.

Global Fund money supports activities designed to reduce disease. The fund says its money has never been used to conduct abortion, voluntary or otherwise. Its grants to China have gone to AIDS prevention outreach to women, to conduct studies on the response to HIV and to publish a column on AIDS prevention in a magazine.