WASHINGTON (March 10) - - Both houses of Congress will be voting on several important pro-life issues during the months ahead. Here is a summary of some of those issues.
At NRL News deadline on March 10, the House and Senate were preparing to vote on legislation that would place some curbs on the Clinton Administration's promotion of abortion through the U.S. foreign aid program.
This pro-life effort is spearheaded by Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ). Smith is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Inter-national Operations and Human Rights of the House International Relations Committee, and also co-chairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus.
Last fall, Smith led a group of pro-life House members who vowed to oppose several of the Administration's high-priority legislative requests (involving presidential "fast track" trade authority, U.S. funding of the U.N., and billions of dollars in credit to the International Mone-tary Fund) unless the White House accepted compromise pro-life language that would cut off funding of organizations that lobby to legalize abortion in foreign nations (for example, nations in Latin America and Africa).
The White House refused to budge, so the Congress adjourned in November without enactment of either the pro-life Smith language or the White House requests. [See "Congress Wraps Up for 1997," November 18, 1997, NRL News, page 8.]
More recently, pro-life Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the House Republican leadership agreed to send Smith's language to President Clinton as part of a bill authorizing certain State Department programs, which also includes $926 million in payments which the U.S. "owes" to the United Nations.
The Administration badly wants these U.N. payments, but has threatened to veto any bill to which the Smith language is attached. However, Republican congressional leaders have told the White House that if it rejects the pro-life language, its request for $18 billion for the Inter-national Monetary Fund is also in jeopardy.
In January, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the linkage "legislative blackmail." Grover Joseph Rees, the chief counsel for Smith's subcommittee, responded that for the Adminis-tration "to reject the compromise and accuse Smith of blackmail is an outrage."
Last October, President Clinton vetoed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The president's "veto message" was returned to the House of Representatives, where it now awaits a "veto override" vote. A two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate will be required to override the veto, with the House required to vote first.
Last fall, before the veto, the House approved the bill by 10 votes more than a two-thirds margin. However, the Senate vote in favor of the ban - - 64-36 - - was three votes short of the required two-thirds majority. So far, none of the 36 senators who voted against the bill have announced a change of heart.
It is expected that congressional leaders will delay the veto override votes at least until mid-summer, in order to allow pro-life groups full opportunity to engage in public education and lobbying campaigns aimed at obtaining the additional three votes in the Senate.
On February 12, Senator Spencer Abraham (R-Mi.) introduced the Child Custody Protec-tion Act (S. 1645) in the U.S. Senate, with 19 original cosponsors.
The Child Custody Protection Act would make it a federal offense to transport a minor across state lines for the purpose of obtaining an abortion, if this circumvents a state law requiring parental or judicial involvement in a minor's abortion decision. [For details on the bill, see "NRLC Pushes For Federal Ban on Inter-state Circumvention of Parental Consent Laws," February 11 NRL News, page 1.]
The same bill will be introduced soon in the House by Congress-woman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl.). Rep. Ros-Lehtinen has delayed formal introduction of the measure in order to give a larger number of her colleagues the opportunity to sign on as "original cosponsors."
A letter from Ros-Lehtinen to other House members, inviting them to cosponsor the measure, was co-signed by Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tx.), Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tx.), and Republican Conference Chairman John Boehner (R-Ohio).
So far, about 60 lawmakers have co-sponsored the House bill.
On February 11, the Senate voted to avoid consideration of legislation that would establish a national policy regarding the cloning of human beings.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Ms.) had pushed for fast action on a bill recently proposed by pro-life Senators Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) and Bill Frist (R-Tn.) (S. 1601). The Bond-Frist bill would ban the use of a process technically called "somatic cell nuclear transfer" to create a human embryo.
So far, this process is known to have been used only in animals. It involves removing the nucleus of an egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus of some body cell from an adult, thereby creating an organism that is a genetically identical "copy" of the adult. This genetic duplicate is called a clone.
The Bond-Frist bill was strongly opposed by lobbyists for biotechnology corporations and by some groups advocating research into various diseases. Some of the opponents endorsed a counterproposal offered by pro-abortion Senators Diane Feinstein (D-Ca.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) (S. 1602).
NRLC strongly opposed the Feinstein proposal, which would permit the use of cloning technology to create living human embryos to be used as subjects for medical experimentation, but require that those embryos be killed or allowed to die, rather than be implanted in a woman's womb.
Enactment of the Feinstein proposal "would amount to a declaration by Congress that living human embryos are something other than human beings," NRLC said in a February 5 letter to senators. The letter also noted that under Feinstein's bill, it would be a federal crime to attempt to implant human embryos in a woman rather than killing them.
However, the Senate ended up sidestepping both the Bond-Frist and the Feinstein bills. Lott needed 60 votes to bring the issue up, but only 42 senators voted to do so. Senate Democrats voted as a bloc to set the issue aside, and so did 12 Republicans.
Several congressional committees are considering looking at the cloning issue later in the year.
In February, a determined minority of Republican senators prevented the Senate from approving the McCain-Feingold bill, which would place sweeping restrictions on the right of citizen groups such as NRLC to communicate with the public about politicians' positions on right-to-life issues. The House will take up speech-restrictive "campaign reform" legislation the week of March 23. (See story, page 1, and Action Alert, backcover.)
Please send a copy of any letter received from a Member of Congress on these or other pro-life issues, or any newspaper report that discusses a law-maker's position on such issues, to the NRLC Federal Legislative Office, 419-Seventh Street, N.W., Suite 500, Washington, D.C. 20004, fax (202) 347-3668, e-mail: Legfederal@aol.com.