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Will Abortion Become a Crime?
Washington -- President Bush signed legislation Thursday making it a seperate Federal crime to harm a fetus during the commission of a violent federal crime against a pregnant woman. It is a law that extends into the womb. Bush declared that, it is a key victory that will "end an abhorrent practice and continue to build a culture of life in America."
In a ceremony suffused with the politics of abortion, the president said, "Any time an expectant mother is a victim of violence, two lives are in the balance, each deserving protection, and each deserving justice."
The Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA) protects a fetus at any stage of its development. While the law exempts abortions, and its backers insist that it has nothing to do with the abortion debate, it provocatively defines an "unborn child" as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb." This definition does not coexist easily with the notion that killing one's own fetus is a matter of constitutional right, which is one of the reasons the bill appeals to abortion opponents.
At its foundation it deals with the central question in the abortion debate: At what point does an embryo or a fetus deserve full protection of the law as a living person? Will another person (for instance a father?, Grandparents?) be able to call upon the new legislation and have the police stop an abortion that a woman actually wants to have? Will the abortionists, or the woman be arrested for murder? Attempted murder? What does it mean to have a legally defined category of person whose killing the law calls murder in some contexts and a matter of judicially enforceable maternal right in others? Advocates of abortion rights fear it will be used to establish precedent that could undercut those rights, established in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade.
Allen Gavel, Esq., in-house attorney for Voice of Freedom says "No, The Courts will issue an injunction. It will be contested, it limits the options of womens choices. It also impinges on Roe v. Wade." "It (the legislation), he says, is part of a multipronged effort to outlaw abortion altogether by whittling at the edges of abortion rights."
In fact, Bush signed into law last year another act that outlaws a procedure described by opponents as "partial-birth abortion," and by most doctors as "intact dilation and extraction." It provides no exceptions for the health of the mother and is so "hopelessly unclear" that it could outlaw more common procedures performed as early as 13 weeks gestation and thereby place an undue burden on a woman's right to choose whether to have an abortion. The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act "is part of a larger agenda, and that agenda is to outlaw all abortions, at any time during pregnancy, for any reason," said Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation, which filed the lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco.
The plaintiffs, including Planned Parenthood, the Federation of America, National Abortion Federation, Center for Reproductive Rights and doctors from Nebraska, New York, Virginia and Iowa, contend that the law is unconstitutional because it contains the same deficiencies as one overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000.
The trials began just days after the U.S. Senate passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which allows the filing of murder charges in federal crimes that result in the death of a fetus. Proponents of the bill, applaud it as a crime-fighting measure. But by defining a fetus as a person from the time of conception, abortion proponents fear, it advances the goals of those eager to outlaw the procedure.
And if you think that this is not a government intrusion upon your personal life think about how Ashcroft delved into women who had abortions medical records. Attorney General John Ashcroft stirred controversy recently when he issued subpoenas to hospitals and clinics across the country, including the University of Michigan Health System, for abortion records. Ashcroft argued that they are necessary to determine whether the procedures were medically necessary.
But, the University of Michigan Health System said its medical records have no relevant information in a lawsuit over partial-birth abortion, and declined to turn them over to the federal government.
On March 12, a federal judge in Detroit ordered the health system to release the records of abortion patients in compliance with a U.S. Department of Justice subpoena, with stipulations protecting certain areas of privacy. But the judge allowed the university to review the records to determine whether any are relevant to the lawsuit.
The subpoenas have been decried by the facilities and abortion-rights proponents as an intimidation tactic and an unjustifiable invasion of the privacy of patients.
Asked what he would say to those who believe the law is part of an administration effort to chip away at abortion rights, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said, "This is legislation that enjoyed broad bipartisan support. It has the strong support among the American people."
Standing behind Bush as he spoke after signing the UVVA were Sharon Rocha and Ron Grantski, the mother and stepfather of Laci Peterson. Peterson was eight months pregnant when she disappeared from her Modesto home in 2002. Her remains and those of her unborn son washed ashore in San Francisco Bay months later.
Her killing spurred efforts to pass the bill, which had stalled before national attention was focused on her. Her husband, Scott, has been charged in state court with two counts of murder. He has pleaded not guilty.
Relatives of three other pregnant women who were murdered -- and whose fetuses died in those crimes -- attended the ceremony, the White House said. Also participating was Tracy Marciniak-Seavers, whose unborn son was killed in an attack in Milwaukee. The White House said that her fetus, in its ninth month, was not recognized as a victim under Wisconsin law at the time.
The measure received final approval March 25, when the Senate passed it 61-38. The House approved it in late February 245-163.
More than half the states already have laws allowing separate charges to be filed in the death or injury of a fetus. The legislation signed by Bush makes it a separate crime to harm a fetus during the commission of 68 federal crimes, such as kidnapping across state lines, drug-related drive-by shootings, interstate stalking and assaults on federal property.
During the Senate debate, abortion-rights advocates presented the bill as a thinly veiled effort to overturn a woman's right to an abortion by giving the fetus a separate legal identity.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. -- who unsuccessfully tried to amend the bill during Senate debate to make it more palatable to abortion rights supporters -- wrote Bush on Thursday asking him to make clear as he signed it that the measure had nothing to do with abortion, but Bush made no such statement.
Had the policy goal been simply to value fetal life by punishing those who harm pregnant women, that could have been accomplished uncontroversially. A narrowly defeated amendment proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) would have prohibited terminating a woman's pregnancy while committing a violent crime but not defined that act as murder. But that wasn't good enough for the bill's backers. As the National Right to Life Committee put it, Ms. Feinstein's amendment "would codify the doctrine that when a woman and her unborn child are injured or killed during a federal crime, that crime has only a single victim" -- which would defeat the whole purpose.
This law does not impinge on abortion rights in any immediate sense. It is, however, part of a long-term pattern in which legal abortion is surrounded by criminal laws and other regulations that protect fetuses and define them in legal terms as separate individuals. This new law will aid criminal enforcement only marginally; it will be another unwarranted step toward making constitutionally protected abortion seem an anomaly in the context of law.