The Unborn Victims of Violence Act sounds good, IS it?

Have you heard about the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA)? It's a very interesting piece of legislation. When it was introduced a number of years ago, Ms. Magazine asked us to consider, "Is it really an antiabortion bill in disguise? Those who are for the bill say that it protects pregnant women because there would be additional penalties for any federal crime where someone injures or kills a fetus. This sounds good, right? But, the bill doesn't say anything about protecting the woman, just the fetus. The bill basically makes the fetus a separate person.

In other words if someone commits a violent act against a pregnant woman (and that act happens to be a federal crime), the attacker is charged with attacking two people instead of one, if the fetus is harmed or the pregnancy is terminated.

In Arkansas, a 12-week-old fetus is a legal person; in California, it's seven weeks, but the UVVA only says, "at any stage of development" even if the woman doesn't know that she is pregnant. This could mean that a nine-month-old fetus or a six-day-old blastocyst yet to implant in the womb or even a fertilized five-hour-old zygote would have the same rights as the woman who was attacked. This might affect abortion rights and certain forms of birth control too.

Representative Zoe Lofgren (D.-Calif.) proposed compromise legislation that provided increased penalties for attacking pregnant women but didn't treat the fetus as a person. Conservatives shot down this compromise and the law was signed in by George W. Bush in 2004.

"The real goal of this legislation is to erode the reproductive rights of women," says Monica Hobbs, of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, which has fought hard against the bill.

"Whenever a fetus or a zygote is given legal status as a person, it hurts women's reproductive rights," says Rosemary Dempsey, director of government relations at the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in Washington. "This bill does nothing but diminish the status of women."

The bill punishes people for hurting a fetus, but in a very sneaky way it sets the stage to take away a woman's reproductive rights. Make sure your parents get all the facts about this piece of very important legislation before they form an opinion about it.