The US House of Representatives last month passed a bill, by a vote of 252 to 172, that, if approved by the Senate, would give a new legal status to the fetus. It establishes criminal penalties for harming a fetus during the commission of a federal offence against a pregnant woman.
Republican Representative Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who introduced the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, wrote: "Under the bill, criminals who commit an already defined federal crime of violence (bombing, car jacking etc) against a pregnant woman can be charged with a second offence on behalf of the second victim, the unborn child."
A message from the White House said that the administration supported the protection of unborn children and therefore supported the passage of the bill.
Supporters of the bill called it an antiviolence measure designed to ensure that criminals who attacked a pregnant woman were charged with murder or manslaughter if the woman survived but her "unborn child" died. They have admitted that the legislation's purpose is to recognise the existence of a separate legal "person" where no recognition currently exists.
The National Right to Life Committee took out advertisements showing a Wisconsin woman, Tracy Scheide Marciniak, who was attacked when she was nine months pregnant, cradling the body of the son who had been just days away from delivery. Republicans had a poster of the photograph on the House floor.
The bill says specifically that it does not apply to abortion. Its opponents claimed, however, that the legislation was a thinly disguised effort to undermine abortion rights by granting a new legal status to a fetus.
The National Organization for Women urged its members to lobby their representatives in Congress by declaring: "This bill does not protect women and would undermine their reproductive rights by making a fetus—at any stage of development—an independent person with separate constitutional rights."
The House passed a similar bill by a vote of 254 to 172 in 1999, but the threat of a veto by President Clinton kept it from becoming law. The current bill now moves to the US Senate, where party leaders seem disinclined to act on it in the near future.