Neo,
The Reps are setting themselves up for a major fall. They are claiming that this bill is not related to abortion. What a bunch of liars.
dailynews.yahoo.com
House Passes Bill Defining Fetuses As People
By Deborah Zabarenko
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A bill that defines fetuses as human beings passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday, after hours of partisan debate over whether this definition would erode abortion rights.
The Unborn Victims of Violence Act would make it a federal crime to harm a fetus -- defined as ``a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb'' -- during a violent criminal attack on a pregnant woman.
Lawmakers voted for the Republican-sponsored bill by a wide margin, 252-172, and defeated a substitute measure that excluded the fetal definition, 196-229. Both votes were generally partisan.
Minutes after the vote, Oklahoma Republican Rep. J.C. Watts (news - bio - voting record) issued a statement on the bill, taking aim at abortion rights supporters.
``They lied to us about the gruesome practice of partial-birth abortion, and now they are trying to tell us that there is nothing inside a mother's womb that ought to be protected from a murderer,'' Watts said. ``This is wrong. We must stand up for mothers and their children.''
The bill's supporters, predominantly Republicans during the debate, denied the measure is anti-abortion, and instead is aimed at punishing criminals who attack pregnant women. It exempts abortions performed with the woman's consent.
But those who opposed the bill, overwhelmingly Democrats, maintained the definition of fetus put the abortion issue into high relief. Their substitute bill would have toughened sentences for attacks against pregnant women that result in the ''interruption'' or ``termination'' of the pregnancy.
Rep. Tom DeLay (news - bio - voting record), a Texas Republican, vehemently urged colleagues to support the bill sponsored by Rep. Lindsey Graham (news - bio - voting record), a South Carolina Republican, and reject the substitute offered by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (news - bio - voting record), a California Democrat.
The Lofgren bill, DeLay said, ``fails to acknowledge that when unborn children are killed they have been murdered. Life and death should not be subsumed beneath a semantic fog.''
24 States Have Similar Laws
Other Republicans stressed that 24 states have laws similar to the bill at issue, and that it deals only with women who have already chosen to carry a pregnancy to term. Still others, including Graham, noted that an identical bill passed the House in 1999.
The Senate did not act on it then, but that was during the Clinton administration, which championed abortion rights. The current Bush administration has acted to restrict abortion.
The Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade (news - web sites) decision recognized a right to choose abortion, and has never accepted the definition of a fetus as a human being.
Rep. John Conyers (news - bio - voting record), a Michigan Democrat, scoffed at Republicans' repeated comment that the bill was not meant to attack the Roe v. Wade ruling.
``Most people understand that (Roe) is under attack and that's why the National Abortion Rights and Reproductive Action League is opposed, Planned Parenthood (news - web sites) Federation of America is opposed, the National Abortion Federation (news - web sites) is opposed, the National Women's Law Center is opposed,'' Conyers said. ``You think they don't understand this bill very much? I think they do.''
Conyers and other Democrats also questioned the broad nature of the bill's definition of a fetus, saying it would include fertilized eggs, zygotes, embryos and fetuses as independent victims of crime.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (news - bio - voting record), a Wisconsin Republican, displayed a poster-sized photo of a young woman holding a dead infant and said, ``This is a child that was about ready to be born before he was murdered, and the man who committed this crime, because it was a mere assault on the mother, is now out of prison.
``We have to pass this bill so that somebody who kills a child like this one spends a lot of time in prison to pay for his crime,'' Sensenbrenner said. |
