Senate Passes Unborn Victims Bill

The Senate voted Thursday to make it a separate crime to harm a fetus during commission of a violent federal crime, a victory for those seeking to expand the legal rights of the unborn.

The 61-38 vote on the Unborn Victims of Violence Act sends the legislation, after a five-year battle in Congress, to President Bush for his signature. The White House said in a statement that it "strongly supports protection for unborn children." The House passed the bill last month.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said the bill is "powerful because this act is about simple humanity, about simple reality."

But abortion rights lawmakers contended that giving a fetus, from the point of conception, the same legal rights as its mother sets a precedent that could be used in future legal challenges to abortion rights.

It is the second big win for social conservatives pushing protections for the unborn following enactment of the so-called partial birth abortion ban last year. That law is now tied up in the courts.

The Senate cleared the way for passage with a 50-49 vote to defeat an amendment, sponsored by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif. and backed by opponents of the bill, that would have increased penalties but maintained that an attack on a pregnant woman was a single-victim crime.

Three Democrats voted with most Republicans to defeat the Feinstein amendment and four Republicans voted for the amendment. On final passage, twelve Democrats voted for it, and two Republicans voted no.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Mr. Bush's opponent this fall, interrupted his campaign schedule to vote yes on the one-victim amendment. He voted no on final passage.

The bill states that an assailant who attacks a pregnant woman while committing a violent federal crime can be prosecuted for separate offenses against both the woman and her unborn child. The legislation defines an "unborn child" as a child in utero, which it says "means a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."

"This bill recognizes that there are two victims," said Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, a chief sponsor. Americans, he said, "intuitively know that there is a victim besides the mother."

But Feinstein said that by defining when life begins, the bill was "the first step in removing a woman's right to choice, particularly in the early months of a pregnancy before viability." She said it could also chill embryonic stem cell research.

The Senate also defeated an amendment by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., that would require employers to give unpaid leave, and states to pay unemployment benefits, to women when they or family members are victims of domestic or sexual violence.

Supporters of the bill have named it after Laci Peterson and her unborn child, Conner, victims in the highly publicized murder case in California. California, one of 29 states with an unborn victims law, is trying Peterson's husband, Scott, on double murder charges.

Laci Peterson's stepfather, Ron Grantski, said at a Capitol Hill news conference that he and Laci's mother had received several hundred thousand sympathy cards and "they all mourned our loss of Laci and Conner — not Laci and the fetus."

The Senate bill covers 68 federal crimes of violence, such as drug-related shootings, violence at an international airport, terrorist attacks, crimes on a military base or threats against a witness in a federal proceeding.

A crime against an unborn fetus could occur even if the perpetrator did not know the victim was pregnant, or did not intend to hurt the unborn child.

It would specifically exclude prosecution of legally performed abortions — a fact supporters cite in arguing that the bill would not undermine the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision affirming a woman's right to end a pregnancy.

"The criminals who commit these crimes are not committing abortions," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. "They are depriving these unborn children of the right to life. It's a separate issue related to the right to life."

Groups on both sides of the abortion issue lobbied hard on the legislation. Johnson's group noted that family members — including Laci Peterson's mother — who had lost loved ones in attacks on pregnant women were in Washington to urge senators to pass the bill.

The Christian Coalition of America said votes for either the Murray or Feinstein amendments would be regarded as negative votes on its annual congressional scorecard of lawmakers.

On the other side, NARAL Pro-Choice America delivered more than 130,000 petitions to senators urging defeat of the bill because the group said it would allow judges to rule that humans at any stage of development deserve protection, even when that protection trumps a woman's interest in ending a pregnancy.

"This would be the first time in federal law that an embryo or fetus is recognized as a separate and distinct person under the law, separate from the woman," said NARAL president Kate Michelman. "Much of this is preparing for the day the Supreme Court has a majority that will overrule Roe v. Wade."