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Consider these lines from Section 1531(a):

"Any physician who, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both..."

People who oppose the killing of children by abortion techniques have  usually supported efforts made in recent years to make it a crime for an abortionist to use this particular method. But even if we support these efforts, we should not be blind to the pitiful weakness of bills such as this. We have to admit that it is far from satisfactory that a man who brutally murders a child in cold blood should be threatened with "not more than two years" in prison.  He could get more time than that for robbing a drug store or beating up an old woman in a park. How is it that our lawmakers, even those who are considered pro-life, are able to put violent crimes against children into a category that allows for such leniency?

And this:

"A woman upon whom a partial-birth abortion is performed may not be prosecuted..." either for participating in the killing of her child or in conspiring with the abortionist to commit the crime.

I'm aware that people who want to protect children feel they need to go out of their way to demonstrate that they are both "pro-child" and "pro-woman," but really, this is absurd. The child's mother didn't find herself on the abortionist's bloody killing slab by accident. She knew where she was going and why, and to pretend that she didn't is no better than telling her she's a witless moron who has no control over what she does. The "pro-woman" exemption has the effect of suggesting to women that they are too stupid to be responsible for their own actions.

The proposed law makes no mention of whether the victim's father can be charged with the crime or with conspiracy to commit the crime -- an outrageous omission. Do we really think that a woman decides to kill her own child in a vacuum, as it were, without any influence from the child's father, without any manipulation or pressure or coercion? Maybe once in a while a father is totally out of the picture (as in the case of a street prostitute who has no idea who the father is), but as a rule, the father knows. He, too, has blood on his hands if his son or daughter dies in the grip of an abortionist, and the law should deal with him accordingly.

A minor point, but telling: nowhere in this bill is the child referred to simply as a "child." Throughout the text, the sanitized pro-abort way of referring to young children is used: "fetus."

What are we to make of this law?

1. It reveals the weakness -- weakness almost to the point of helplessness -- of pro-life political forces in government and of the pro-life constituency in the body politic. If this is the best that pro-life congressmen can come up with, or the best they think has a chance of passing, the political situation with respect to legal protection for children is truly dismal, and we should not pretend otherwise. If we kid ourselves, we may not pray as earnestly as we should, and we may waste our energy in futile endeavors.

2. A lot has been made of the technique itself. There is a "sense of congress" attached to one version of the bill you'll find at the Thomas search engine: "SENSE OF CONGRESS- It is the sense of the Congress that partial birth abortions are horrific and gruesome procedures that should be banned." This is gratuitous. The horrific thing about murder is that it is murder. Whether or not it is "gruesome" is hardly something that needs to be addressed by the law, as if a less gruesome murder would somehow not be as bad as a more gruesome murder.

3. While there may be a place for weak legislation such as The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act at this time in our republic's history, we do need a way of establishing perspective. We need someone in Congress who will offer legislation that is coherent and grounded in real justice -- legislation that will refer to children as children and call murder what it is, legislation that will propose a penalty fitting the crime, and that will not allow conspirators to escape into a special  women-are-too-dumb   category. Is there any Senator or Congressman who will propose a real law? If there is such a person, will there be any votes? Maybe not, but there comes a time when this nation needs the truth whether anyone will vote for the truth or not.

Peter Barry 11/22/1999

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