House debates bill criminalizing 'violent harm' to the yet-to-be-born

By Ian Christopher McCaleb
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The House of Representatives is engaged in a difficult debate Thursday on a Republican bill that would criminalize the harm brought to a gestating fetus when a violent act is committed against its mother.

The bill, titled by sponsor Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina as the "Unborn Victims of Violence Act," would make a perpetrator subject to a second criminal offense if he or she attacks a pregnant woman and the fetus that the woman is carrying is injured -- or the pregancy is involuntarily terminated -- as result of that assault.

In essence, Graham seeks to create a federal law that would provide the same sort of punishment guidelines for harm to the fetus as would be applied for physical harm to the mother.

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"This bill should have the support of everyone in Congress," said Rep. Sue Myrick, R-North Carolina. "We should all agree to help young women from forced, cruel and painful abortions."

That word, "abortion," represented the true nature of Thursday's discourse in the minds of many chamber Democrats, who viewed Graham's legislation as a Republican trial balloon in this new era of a GOP-controlled legislative and executive branch.

Those who spoke in opposition said the bill represented an effort on the part of Republicans to undermine the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand.

In doing so, they argued, the Republicans were trying to begin a process that might eventually lead to the collapse of legal protections for abortion.

"This bill, for the first time, would recognize a fetus as a person, with rights separate and equal from those of the woman," said Rep. Hilda Solis, D-California.

"There will be no sneaking around today," said a testy Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. "You might as well start off defending the proposition that is embedded fatally in this bill."

Republicans sought to bolster their case by providing a variety of examples of vicious crimes they said have gone unpunished because some states and the military justice system do not recognize the fetus as a legal entity.

An example brought up numerous times was that of Gregory Robbins, an airman stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base who beat his 18-year-old wife in 1996, killing the child she was carrying.

"Air Force prosecutors could charge Gregory Robbins with simple assault, but they couldn't charge him in the death of the couple's child," Myrick said. "The law ignored her pregnancy."

"This isn't a matter of how many (crimes) you can dig up," Conyers said. "It is a question of how we can deal with the subject. "If that is the way we're going to get to undermining Roe vs. Wade, our job today is to make it clear what is really going on."

"If this is an abortion bill, it is one of the worst-drafted abortion bills you can think of," Graham said, quoting a section of the bill that read, "Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the prosecution ... of any person for conduct relating to an abortion for which the consent of the pregnant woman ... has been obtained."

Democrats will advance a substitute bill later in the day that would attempt to alter the language of Graham's base legislation by creating a new legal status for harm against a pregnant woman, rather than applying two standards to one violent crime.

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The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy
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