Pro-Abortion Groups Vehemently Oppose Bill

U.S. House Votes to Recognize Unborn Victims of Violence

WASHINGTON (May 3) - - A bill to recognize unborn children as human victims when they are injured or killed during the commission of federal crimes was approved April 26 by the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill was backed by NRLC and by President George W. Bush.

The House passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (H.R. 503) by a vote of 252-172. But that victory came only after a much closer vote on whether to erase the bill and replace it with a radically different measure proposed by pro-abortion lawmakers, the Lofgren Substitute Amendment, which is referred to by pro- life forces as the "one-victim amendment."

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act is sponsored by Congressman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Oh.).

President Bush supports the bill. In a statement sent to the House two days before the vote, the White House said, "The Administration supports protection for unborn children and therefore supports House passage of H.R. 503. . . . The Administration would strongly oppose any amendment to H.R. 503, such as a so-called 'One-Victim' Substitute, which would define the bill's crimes as having only one victim - - the pregnant woman."

Following the vote, the President commended the House's action and said, "This legislation affirms our commitment to a culture of life, which welcomes and protects children." The measure now faces an uncertain future in the Senate, where pro-abortion forces are stronger. The House passed the same bill in 1999, but it died without action in the Senate, weighed down by a veto threat from President Clinton.

"I think there will probably be a filibuster in the Senate put on by the Democrats, and it'll be hard to get the votes," said ABC News commentator Cokie Roberts on ABC's This Week on April 29.

"And it'll make the Democrats look like extremists on this issue."

Pro-Abortion Groups Oppose Two-Victims Bill

Under the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, if someone injures or kills an unborn child while committing a violent federal crime against a pregnant woman, the assailant will be charged with a separate offense on behalf of the unborn child. Currently, federal criminal law does not recognize unborn children as crime victims.

"Today, if a pregnant woman is assaulted in a federal jurisdiction and her unborn child is killed, it is regarded simply as an assault - - no different from breaking a finger," explained NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson. "Under the bill, the attacker would be charged for two crimes, and punished separately for the crime done to each human victim."

The bill applies to any "child in utero," defined as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb." The proposed law would come into play only when someone commits a crime against a pregnant woman that is covered by any of 68 existing federal laws listed in the bill. These include, for example, crimes committed on military bases, attacks on federal officials, and terrorist bombings.

The penalty for the injury to or killing of the unborn child would be equal to that for the same harm done to a born person under the applicable federal law. However, the death penalty would not be imposed.

The bill explicitly does not apply to legal abortions or to acts by the mother herself that harm her unborn child. Nevertheless, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and other pro-abortion groups strongly oppose the bill, because they do not want unborn children to be recognized in any area of law.

"There can be no doubt that it's a cunning attempt to separate the fetus from the mother in the eyes of the law and in the court of public opinion," commented Laura Murphy, director of the Washington office of the ACLU, which opposes the bill.

"The pro-abortion lobby opposes a right to life for unborn babies, even when that right is violated by violent criminals," said NRLC's Johnson.

One-Victim Proposal Rejected

In order to pass the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, pro-life forces first had to defeat the Lofgren Substitute Amendment, dubbed the "one-victim amendment" by the pro-life lawmakers.

The Lofgren Amendment would have erased the Unborn Victims of Violence Act and replaced it with an entirely different proposal. The substitute would have provided stiffer penalties for criminals who cause "an interruption to the normal course of the pregnancy" while committing a federal crime against a pregnant woman, but it would also have enacted the illogical doctrine that such crimes have only one victim - - the mother.

After extensive debate, the one-victim amendment was rejected 229-196. The House then passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, in its original form, by a vote of 252 to 172. (Both roll calls appear on pages 30-31 of this issue.)

Final passage of the bill was supported by 198 Republicans and 53 Democrats, and opposed by 21 Republicans and 150 Democrats, with one independent voting on each side.

Of these two roll calls, the first was the most important, because if the Lofgren "one-victim" substitute had been adopted, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act would have died.

"Of the 252 House members who voted to pass the bill, 25 did so only after they had first voted to kill the bill and replace it with the one-victim measure," commented NRLC's Johnson. "House members who voted that way clearly demonstrated their preference for not recognizing the unborn child as a crime victim in federal law. They, and the other 172 lawmakers who opposed the bill even on the final vote, will have to explain why they voted to say that when a criminal attacks a pregnant woman and kills her unborn child, nobody has really died."

Spirited Debate

During four hours of spirited debate in the House, pro-life lawmakers displayed a poster-sized photo of Tracy Marciniak holding the body of her son Zachariah, who was killed in a criminal assault in Wisconsin in 1992. (The photo appears on the cover of this issue. It may also be viewed or downloaded at the NRLC website at www.nrlc.org.)

Because Wisconsin at that time lacked an unborn victims law, the attacker was convicted only of the injury he did to Mrs. Marciniak and not for the death of Zachariah, and he is already eligible for parole. In 1998, the Wisconsin legislature enacted a strong unborn victims law, due to the efforts of Mrs. Marciniak and Wisconsin Right to Life.

Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), co-chairman of the House Pro- Life Caucus, said, "Anybody who thinks there is no dead baby in this picture should vote for the one-victim amendment. But anybody who sees in this photo a grieving mother holding her dead son should vote for the Unborn Victims of Violence Act."

NRLC featured the photo in an advertisement in which Mrs. Marciniak told her story (see page 8). A second NRLC ad contained the account of Shiwona Pace of Arkansas, whose unborn daughter Heaven was killed in the ninth month in a murder-for- hire crime in 1999 (see page 9). Both NRLC ads ran in several Capitol Hill publications during the week of vote. In addition, Tracy Marciniak came to Washington to meet with lawmakers from Wisconsin, and appeared on numerous news broadcasts regarding the debate.

Opponents of the bill argued that, even though legal abortions are excluded from the bill, the bill would undermine legal abortion by recognizing the unborn child as a separate human individual. Opponents also insisted that it violated the principles of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand. Typical were the remarks of Congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Ca.), "This legislation is deceptive, destructive, and a poor attempt to mislead and strip away a woman's reproductive rights. This bill is extremely volatile and has the potentiality to eradicate a woman's right to choose as recognized by the landmark case Roe v. Wade."

Bill supporters responded that 24 states have already enacted unborn victim laws, and that courts have upheld these laws against all legal challenges, since they do not apply to legal abortions.

(The bill does not replace or supersede these state laws, since it would apply only in cases in which an unborn child is harmed during commission of a federal crime. For a listing of the state laws, see www.nrlc.org/Unborn_Victims/sthomicidelaws.htm.)

Pro-life lawmakers also noted that in the 1989 case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the U.S. Supreme Court found no problem with a Missouri law declaring that "the life of each human being begins at conception" and conferring on the "unborn child at every stage of development, all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons . . .," as long as Missouri did not use this law to interfere with abortions.

National Journal reported (April 21) that Heather Boonstra, a senior public policy associate for the pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute, acknowledged that the bill "would probably survive a court challenge."

Bill supporters also noted that on July 25, 2000, the House approved, 417-0, a bill called the Innocent Child Protection Act, to prohibit the federal or state governments from carrying out an execution on any woman who carries a "child in utero," defined in precisely the same language as that contained in the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. (See www.nrlc.org/Unborn_Victims/ index.html.)

"The only people who have anything to fear from this debate are criminals who engage in violence against pregnant women and their unborn children," said Congressman Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee, which had previously held a public hearing on the bill and approved it.

Reactions to Vote

Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), lamented House approval of the bill and said, "Anti-choice lawmakers introduced this bill with the specific intent of furthering their goal of ending legal abortion. The act is part of a concerted effort to capitalize on the anti-choice presidency of George W. Bush."

Also attacking the bill was Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, who in a press release said, "This is not a pro-life bill," because it does not ban abortion.

(NRLC's Johnson responded, "Abortion is a key pro-life issue, but it is not the only pro-life issue. After all, the babies killed by criminal attackers are just as dead as those killed in abortion facilities. Since there is no court-created barrier to keep Congress and the state legislatures from passing laws to protect unborn babies from criminal attackers, we would be poor defenders of unborn children if we did not insist on enactment of such laws without delay.")

Life Advocacy Alliance welcomed the House vote and credited "a powerful NRL ad campaign" for defeating the "one-victim" substitute by a larger margin than in 1999.

Cathleen Cleaver, a spokeswoman for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the House vote "a powerful message that when a violent assault is committed against a pregnant woman and her baby, under federal law judgment and punishment will be meted out for violent acts against two victims, not one."

Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, a 1.6-million-member Catholic fraternal organization, commended the House's action but added, "It is sad to note the pro-abortion extremism that led some members to oppose [the bill]. Even though the bill explicitly did not apply to abortion, abortion supporters apparently thought it more important to deny women the additional legal protections it offered for fear of acknowledging, in any way at all, the humanity of unborn human life."