Should a woman who carries an innocent unborn child be executed?  Al Gore chuckles and says he wants to “think about it.”  Excerpted from NBC “Meet the Press,” July 16, 2000

MR. RUSSERT:  Right now there’s legislation which says that a woman on death row, if she’s pregnant, she should not be executed.  Do you support that?  [Russert refers here to Title 18 USCA §3596(b), enacted in 1994:  “A (federal) sentence of death shall not be carried out upon a woman while she is pregnant.”]

VICE PRESIDENT GORE:  I don’t know what you’re talking about.

MR. RUSSERT:  It’s a federal statute, on the books, that if a woman is pregnant and she’s on [federal] death row, she should not be executed.

GORE:  Well . . . [chuckles] . . . I don’t know what the circumstances would be in that situation.  I would . . . you know, it’s an interesting fact situation.  I’d want to think about it.

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From The New York Times, July 18, 2000:  At a news conference today (Monday) shortly after rallying his troops in Nashville . . . Mr. Gore said he favored allowing a pregnant woman to choose whether to delay her execution until she gave birth.   “The principle of a woman’s right to choose governs in that case,” he said.  At an earlier news conference in Little Rock, Ark., Governor Bush tweaked Mr. Gore for his answer in the [Meet the Press] television interview, saying he was “surprised, frankly,” that the vice president had needed time to think about the matter.  [. . . Bush] said he would support postponing such an execution “because there’s a second life involved.”