House OKs Bill to Give Fetuses Separate Status

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday approved a bill that would grant new legal protection to the human fetus, a victory for antiabortion groups that pushed the measure as their first legislative test since the election of President Bush.

The bill’s prospects of becoming law remain uncertain, however, because of strong Senate opposition.

The measure would for the first time make it a separate federal crime to harm or kill a fetus in the course of committing another federal crime. Proponents cast it as an anti-crime measure.

“It’s not about the abortion debate,” said Rep. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), the bill’s principal author. “Today is about bringing the country together . . . to put people in jail that deserve to go.”

But helping propel the measure was strong support from antiabortion groups. And the bill’s critics argued it was a sneak attack on abortion rights that, by treating the fetus as a legal entity separate from the pregnant mother, would lay the groundwork for undermining a woman’s right to an abortion.

“In truth, we all know that this bill is here because it is aimed at abortion politics,” said Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.) an abortion-rights advocate. “It is designed to come in the back door to try to define the fetus as a person.”

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) asserted that the bill’s aim “is only to tear apart Roe vs. Wade,” the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that established a woman’s right to abortion.

The measure, known as the Fetal Protection Act, passed, 252 to 172; a comparable bill won House approval in 1999 by a virtually identical tally. Thursday’s vote showed that, to some degree, the abortion issue crosses party lines--53 Democrats joined 198 Republicans and one independent in voting for the bill; 21 Republicans, 150 Democrats and one independent voted against it.

Bush has announced his support for the bill, signaling the change in the political climate for this and other antiabortion legislation in the wake of the 2000 elections. The similar bill passed by the House two years ago was opposed by President Clinton.

After Thursday’s vote, Bush said: “This legislation affirms our commitment to a culture of life, which welcomes and protects children.”

But the measure’s chances of passing the Senate and landing on Bush’s desk appear slim. The 1999 version of the legislation stalled there, and the 2000 elections strengthened Senate support for abortion rights.

Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), a leading abortion-rights foe, held out little hope for Senate action on the new House bill. The 50-50 split between the parties in the Senate means that “any bill that passes the House has a rocky road,” Hyde said.

The bottom line is that, although antiabortion forces welcomed the arrival of an ally to the White House and enjoy the advantage of having Congress controlled by the GOP, their legislative agenda still is largely stymied.

“The politics of the moment are such that there is a great irony: There is pro-life leadership in the legislature and executive branch, but it’s next to impossible to move any significant type of legislation,” said Marshall Wittman, a conservative political analyst at the Hudson Institute.

Along with the fetal protection bill, another priority for antiabortion groups has been a ban on the procedure known as “partial-birth abortion.” Bills outlawing the procedure twice passed Congress in the late 1990s, only to be vetoed by Clinton.

Bush made it clear during the 2000 campaign that he would sign such a bill into law. But its proponents are having difficulty rewriting the bill to pass legal muster in light of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that struck down a Nebraska law that banned the procedure in the state. As a result, antiabortion groups decided to initially focus on pushing the fetal protection bill.

Similar bills have been adopted in 24 states, including California; state law was amended in 1970 to make it a crime to kill a fetus. The law applies only to fetuses beyond the embryonic stage--roughly 12 weeks--and only if the assailant knows the woman is pregnant.

The House bill would establish separate federal criminal penalties for an assailant who harms or kills a fetus even at the earliest stages of development--and even if the criminal does not know a woman is pregnant. The penalties would not apply to a woman who harms her own fetus.

Because the law applies only to cases involving federal crimes--such as kidnapping a person across state lines--and not domestic violence incidents that are covered by state law, some experts say the bill would have limited practical impact.

“We don’t have a major problem of fetuses being harmed on federal property,” said Jean Schroedel, chair of the department of politics and policy at Claremont Graduate University, and an expert on fetal protection laws. “Where we have it is fetuses being harmed in the privacy of people’s homes, which this doesn’t affect one iota.”

But Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said his group viewed the bill as needed “even if there are only a small number of cases in which the statute is brought to bear.”

Abortion-rights advocates vigorously opposed the legislation because of its potential effect on the abortion debate.

“Antiabortion supporters want to create more places in law where fetuses are equated with persons,” said Susan Cohen, a legislative analyst at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a research center that supports abortion rights. “The more places they can call fetuses ‘persons’ in federal law, the more that can change the public mind-set about what abortion means.”

The House debate on the bill was marked by graphic anecdotes of violence against pregnant women that resulted in the death of fetuses.

The bill’s supporters cited a case--featured in a National Right to Life Committee advertisement in national newspapers and magazines--of a Wisconsin woman, Tracy Scheide Marciniak, who in her ninth month of pregnancy was brutally beaten by her husband. The advertisement featured a photograph of Marciniak holding the tiny corpse.

“This is a child that was about ready to be born before he was murdered, and the man who committed this crime--because [under state law it] was a mere assault on the mother--is now out of prison,” said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). “We have to pass this bill so that somebody who kills a child like this one [in a federal case] spends a lot of time in prison to pay for his crime.”

The House rejected an alternative by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) that would have imposed stiffer penalties for crimes against pregnant women--without conferring separate legal standing to the fetus.

“We can all agree that acts of violence against women are reprehensible and should be punished,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). But she and others argued that Lofgren’s amendment would accomplish that without taking the step of legally recognizing the fetus as a separate victim.

That is exactly what Graham and his allies found objectionable: that the amendment did not acknowledge that there are two victims in a violent crime against a pregnant woman. “A pregnancy hasn’t been compromised,” Hyde said. “A baby has been killed.”

The amendment was defeated, 229 to 196.

On final passage, 28 of California’s Democratic House members opposed the bill, three did not cast votes--Lois Capps of Santa Barbara, Tom Lantos of San Mateo and Lucille Roybal-Allard of Los Angeles. Among the delegation’s Republicans, 16 voted yes while four opposed it--Mary Bono of Palm Springs, Stephen Horn of Long Beach, Doug Ose of Sacramento and William M. Thomas of Bakersfield.

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Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin and James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.