Abortion Rights by Any Means.(Brief Article)

For many years, a fervent priority of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been to protect and expand abortion rights, thereby leaving defenseless the most vulnerable human beings, the not yet born, each of them with his or her own distinct genetic identity. Predictably, the ACLU has attacked what it scornfully describes as the "so-called Unborn Victims of Violence Act," which passed the House on April 26 252 to 172 with 53 Democratic votes. This bill, says the ACLU, is "a cunning attempt to separate the fetus from the mother in the eyes of the law and in the court of opinion."

The ACLU might be surprised to learn that according to a standard medical text, The Unborn Patient: The Art and Science of Fetal Development (W.B. Saunders, 2001), the fetus is an individual patient, and to be considered "as much a patient as any other patient."

The federal bill, which has yet to pass the Senate, concerns the unborn patient. That is why it alarms the ACLU, the New York Times editorial board, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, and others who believe in "choice" although the choice in this case is unilateral.

If under 68 already-defined federal crimes of violence an attacker has injured a woman, and in that act has injured or killed an unborn child (a fetus), the perpetrator can be charged not only with violence against the woman, but also with the death of or injury to the unborn child.

This is not a radical bill. If it is passed by the Senate and signed by the president, it will not erase Roe v. Wade. H.R. 503, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act that passed the House, states explicitly that nothing in the legislation "shall be construed to permit the prosecution for conduct relating to an abortion for which the consent of the pregnant woman...has been obtained."

Indeed, as the National Right to Life Committee has pointed out and this has not been denied by pro-abortion extremists "twenty-four states have already enacted laws that recognize unborn children as victims of violent crimes, and these state laws have been upheld by the courts." In Arkansas, for example, a living fetus of 12 weeks gestation is a person.

Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) did not object to a Missouri law that confers on the "unborn child at every ...