House bill: Fetus can be a victim of violence
Anti-choice activists discovered somewhere along the road that a full-on frontal assault on a woman's reproductive rights was not going to work. Being the persistent lot that they are, they went to work and tried to come up with a strategy that just might work. What they came up with was the idea of nibbling at a woman's right to choose little by little. Instead of a hammer and chisel, the preferred tool of the anti-choice lobby has become a rubber mallet.
Now they are trying the latest front in this strategy: by treating an attack on a pregnant woman as two separate attacks: on on the woman, and a second on the fetus she is carrying. Wait, you might ask, how could this possibly be anything but a recognition of reality? It IS an attack on two beings.
Well, let's look at it a bit more closely. In order to be able to prosecute an attack on a fetus, a fetus would have to be given the legal standing of a person. This would require the legal definition of life to be changed to reflect the belief that life begins at conception, not at viability. It would also require the fundamental dissembling of Roe v. Wade. This would be yet another brick in the wall for anti-choice activists. One brick here, another brick there- pretty soon you've got yourself a wall. This strategy requires patience, persistence, and the will to continue pushing wherever and whenever an opportunity presents itself. Clearly, the anit-choice lobby is willing to to be all of these things.
To stop this strategy also requires patience, persistence, and the will to fight wherever and whenever the enemy attacks. This, unfortunately, has not always been a hallmark of the pro-choice movement. We run the very real risk of seeing a woman's reproductive rights becoming a thing of the past unless we begin to pay closer attention. If we allow the anti-choice lobby to continue to nibble at the margins, we will have only ourselves to blame when there is nothing left to nibble.
