EDITORIAL
There are better ways to protect pregnancies
If President Bush were truly concerned about pregnant women, he wouldn't have signed a law that outlaws late-term abortion for all women, including those whose health is threatened by a pregnancy. He would have made an exemption for them.
Nor would his administration have undone regulations that force power plants to sharply reduce mercury emissions, which can enter the food chain and threaten the health of pregnant women who eat tainted fish, causing possible brain damage to the unborn child.
And if he truly cared about curbing abortion, he would back comprehensive sex education in the schools in addition to abstinence-only initiatives.
Instead, Bush's record strongly suggests he's far more concerned with granting personhood to fetuses, hence the emotionally charged signing of a bill that would make it a separate federal crime to harm a fetus during an assault on the mother.
Essentially, the law recognizes the fetus as a person separate from the mother, and though it exempts abortion, it nonetheless sets the stage for the eventual definition of abortion as the killing of a human being. And that's why supporters of reproductive rights, including us, are cynical about the law.
Of course we want to protect pregnant women from harm. But the Unborn Victims of Violence Act is about appealing to socially conservative constituents in a re-election campaign. There are far more effective ways to protect pregnant women.
Moreover, in signing the law at an elaborate ceremony Thursday, Bush invoked the case of Laci Peterson, who was eight months pregnant when she was murdered in California in 2002. Bush says the law is for victims like Peterson, but the fact is the law applies to only federal crimes, such as a terrorist attack or drug-related shooting, committed against the pregnant mother. That was not the case with Laci Peterson.
That goes to show that this law is more symbolic than it is practical. Besides, anyone who purposefully kills a pregnant woman is highly likely to get life in prison without the possibility of parole. Or if they're in a state that allows it, the death penalty. So whether we're counting one or two victims, the sentence is likely to be the same in such a case.
The law could have easily been written to allow prosecutors to seek multiple charges against suspects accused of harming pregnant women without granting fetuses individual legal status.
But no. It had to define a fetus as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb." Is it really any wonder that opponents see it as another thinly veiled attack on reproductive rights?
