ASK YOUR CONGRESSMAN TO VOTE FOR THE UNBORN VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE ACT

ASK YOUR CONGRESSMAN TO VOTE FOR THE UNBORN VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE ACT

Under current federal law, an individual who commits a federal crime of violence against a pregnant woman receives no additional punishment for killing or injuring the woman's unborn child during the commission of that crime. Therefore, except in those States that recognize unborn children as victims of such crimes, injuring or killing an unborn child during commission of a violent crime has no legal consequence whatsoever.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act was designed to address this deficiency in the law by providing that an individual who injures or kills an unborn child during the commission of certain predefined violent federal crimes may be punished for a separate offense.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act would enable prosecutors to bring to justice criminals like these: Reginald Anthony Falice, who on April 28, 1998, shot his eight-months-pregnant wife, Ruth Carlson, five times as she sat at a red light in Charlotte, North Carolina. Falice was convicted by a federal jury for interstate domestic violence and using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime, but because federal law does not currently recognize the unborn as victims, he received no additional punishment for killing the near-term infant.

Or the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in New York, killing Monica Smith, a pregnant secretary, and her unborn child. Jurors at one trial were told of the harm inflicted upon Ms. Smith's unborn child, but no additional punishment is provided under federal law for the child's death.

--Former Congressman Charles T. Canady,
introducing hearings on the proposed law on July 21, 1999

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2001 has been introduced in the House of Representatives as H.R. 503 by Congressman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and in the Senate as S. 480 by Senator Mike DeWine (R-Ohio). The House will consider the bill on or about April 25. Your congressman and your senators need to hear that you want them to vote for the bill.

The point of the proposed law is two-fold: (1) Elementary justice demands that the criminal killing or injury of a fellow human being, born or in the womb, be punished. (2) Federal law should reflect the reality that when a criminal assaults a pregnant woman and injures or kills her unborn child, he has claimed two victims.

Currently, 11 states have homicide laws covering unborn children through all stages of pre-natal development. Thirteen states have homicide laws covering unborn children during some stages of pre-natal development. (Consult www.nrlcorg/Whatsnew/sthomicidelaws.htm).

While the proposed federal law is constitutionally sound, there are political obstacles to its passage in Congress: The pro- abortionists in Congress (primarily on the Democratic side) and their friends in the media and the abortion lobby/industry are adamantly against it. For them punishing violent criminals who kill pregnant women and their "child in utero" is somehow incompatible with the right to abort--even though the bill specifically exempts "conduct relating to an abortion for which the consent of the pregnant woman has been obtained" (Without this exception the bill would not survive a challenge in federal court.)

Of course, what the pro-abortionists really fear is that protecting unborn children from violent criminal acts might induce people to think more deeply about the humanity of the unborn. Thus their response to the introduction of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act has ranged from misrepresentation to hysteria to a sort of "willfully naīve" craftiness.

Examples of misrepresentation abound in Juliet Eilperin's report in the Washington Post ("House GOP Pushes New Abortion Limits," 3/16/2001) on the introduction of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Her lead paragraph reads: "With an ally in the White House, House Republicans yesterday opened a coordinated campaign to begin imposing new restrictions on abortion [emphasis added], starting with a bill that would impose penalties on people who harm a fetus during an assault on a pregnant woman." As I noted above, the bill specifically excludes consensual abortion from coverage--it imposes no limits whatsoever on legalized abortion. So, Ms. Eilperin either did not bother to read the short bill or she willfully adopted the polemical misrepresentations of the bill's opponents.

I suspect that Ms. Eilperin's "report" is part of the pro- abortionists' "rally the troops" campaign. The article quotes NARAL President Kate Michelman: "The landscape is full of land mines now that are potentially quite lethal in terms of a woman's right to choose"--to be assaulted by a criminal harming her and her baby, we are to believe?

The "willfully naīve" craftiness of the pro-abortionists is evident in their attempt to replace the Unborn Victims of Violence Act with the phony "Motherhood Protection Act" or Lofgren Amendment. This callous "substitute amendment" wants you to play a dishonest game of pretending that there is only one victim, the mother, because it only seeks to punish the "interruption of the normal course of the pregnancy." The presence of the child in the womb is no-where acknowledged in the bill, and the child's violent death in the "interruption of the normal course of pregnancy" is, in itself, of no consequence to the bill's sponsors.

The Lofgren Amendment demonstrates the terrible logic in the " right to choose" no respect must be shown to the child in the womb; he must forever be a nonentity. Once this logic takes hold of a person, it slowly strangles the heart. What the pro- abortionists really fear is that bills like the Unborn Victims of Violence Act will cause people to stop and reflect--and break free from the terrible logic of "choice." And that would be a very good thing.