April 2, 2004
Dear Concerned Citizen,

I’ve just come from the White House, where I was privileged to watch the President sign into law the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

This is known to many as “Conner’s law” in recognition of the ghastly homicide of Laci Petersen and her unborn son. That dreadful crime put wind in the sails of this legislation, which brings federal law into line with that of many states. The Unborn Victims of Violence act treats those who are murdered in the womb in the course of the commission of a crime against their mothers as victims too.

The issue here is not, of course, abortion, and there were “pro-choice” as well as “pro-life” members of Congress voting it through. Abortion is not in general a crime, so the Unborn Victims Act offers no protection against it. But by drawing attention to the significance of crimes committed against the unborn it underlines the deep ambivalence of Americans on this most divisive of questions. For while their mothers carry them in the womb, unborn babies are distinct individuals. Of course, we know this in experience. The “pro-choice” mother who conceives a child she plans to carry to term speaks about “my baby” as much as the pro-lifer.

More than thirty years after Roe v. Wade the question of abortion is unresolved in American life. From one point of view, the Court took the matter out of the hands of legislators, and therefore the people who elect them. Yet it has not proved to be quite so simple.

Look at the furor over “partial-birth” abortion, a gruesome late-term procedure that has now been prohibited in federal law. Plenty of people who are generally “pro-choice” support the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, including politicians who generally vote down “pro-life” legislation. Why is that? Because, plainly, the closer the baby gets to birth, the harder it is for anyone to overcome the intuitive acknowledgement that it really is a baby. And the harder it gets for them to stomach the grisly killing techniques involved.

Yet courts in three states have blocked enforcement of the law, while they hear challenges to its constitutionality. Earlier state laws have been struck down as unconstitutional, and while those who drafted the ban on partial-birth abortion sought to make it challenge-proof it is inevitable that these federal cases will end up in the Supreme Court. We should follow their progress, in Nebraska, New York City, and San Francisco, follow the arguments, see who gives evidence – as the drama of ambivalence is played out for all to see.

The point is this: as a society we are thoroughly ambivalent about the unborn.

Side by side with this ambivalence we find a wide range of opinions that do not always reflect the “pro-life” v. “pro-choice” alternatives we find in the media. Plenty of Christians check the “pro-life” box when they are asked, but when push comes to shove and they face problem pregnancies they resort to abortion. Plenty more, including large numbers of priests and pastors, do little or nothing about the issue, even though they toe the line and say they are against it. By the same token, there are “pro-choice” women who would never have an abortion, but who defend the principle. And there are others who are deeply happy with abortions done in response to fetal handicap and inherited disease – the kind of eugenic abortion that not so many years ago some evangelicals supported.

Some people, though, are not ambivalent at all. A few weeks ago I was debating Peter Singer, Princeton bioethics professor who has been called “the world’s most influential living philosopher.” Singer candidly believes that handicapped babies should be killed if their parents wish. He has no illusions about abortion, so he is happy to call the embryo and fetus a human being, and to argue that since as a society we kill them before birth, why should it trouble us to kill some of them after they are born?

Ironically, when he opens his mouth and comes out with the logic of what someone has called his “robotic utilitarianism,” people listen. But he is so candid that they draw back. Even “pro-choice” listeners have been made to think again, since when Singer says that there really is no difference between taking the baby’s life before and after birth, they are more liable to believe him than us. Of course, he’s right, as we have been saying all along. Let us continue to work for the day when logic will prevail and the unborn be fully welcomed into the human community.

When I get home what I’m most looking forward to is holding Tessa, our latest grandchild, four weeks old and still as little as many an unborn baby. That’s when I find our ambivalence hardest to understand.

The Rev. Dr. Michael A. Newdow, Esq. -- physician, lawyer and founder of the First Amendmist Church of True Science

Underdog or raging atheist activist? Many don't know that the Pledge controversy is only one of many legal battles Dr. Newdow is waging. Some wonder if his custody battles are a means to another end altogether.

Read more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26780-2003Dec1?language=printer

Jefferson's wall between church and state had less to do with the separation between religion and all civil government than with the separation between federal and state governments on matters pertaining to religion.

"On New Year’s Day, 1802, President Jefferson penned a missive to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. The Baptists had written the new President a fan letter in October 1801, congratulating him on his election to the “chief Magistracy in the United States.” They celebrated his zealous advocacy for religious liberty and chastised those who had criticized him “as an enemy of religion[,] Law & good order.”
In a carefully crafted reply endorsing the persecuted Baptists’ aspirations for religious liberty, the President wrote:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

"Jefferson’s wall, according to conventional wisdom, represents a universal principle on the prudential and constitutional relationship between religion and the civil state. To the contrary, this wall had less to do with the separation between religion and all civil government than with the separation between federal and state governments on matters pertaining to religion (such as official proclamations of days of prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving). The “wall of separation” was a metaphoric construction of the First Amendment, which Jefferson time and again said imposed its restrictions on the federal government only (see, for example, Jefferson’s 1798 draft of the Kentucky Resolutions). In other words, the wall separated the federal regime on one side from state governments and religious authorities on the other."

A Matter of Justice

Both Victims Remembered in Laci and Conner's Law

Laci Peterson's Mother worked vigorously to pass The Unborn Victims of Violence Act. In a poignant letter to Senators Sharon Rocha sharply challenged Senator Feinstein's single-victime proposal saying that it "would be saying that Conner and other innocent victims like him are not really victims - indeed, that they never really existed at all. But our grandson did live. He had a name, he was loved, and his life was violently taken from him before he ever saw the sun."

President Bush echoed that conviction in a speech he made at the signing of that law this week.

"As of today, the law of our nation will acknowledge the plain fact that crimes of violence against a pregnant woman often have two victims. And therefore, in those cases, there are two offenses to be punished. Under this law, those who direct violence toward a pregnant woman will answer for the full extent of the harm they have done, and for all the crimes they have committed."

"This act of Congress addresses tragic losses such as Sharon and Ron have known. They have laid to rest their daughter, Laci, a beautiful young woman who was joyfully awaiting the arrival of a new son. They have also laid to rest that child, a boy named Conner, who was waiting to be born when his life, too, was taken. His little soul never saw light, but he was loved, and he is remembered. And his name is forever joined with that of his mom in this statute, which is also known as Laci and Conner's Law. All who knew Laci Peterson have mourned two deaths, and the law cannot look away and pretend there was just one."

One Victim or Two? Feinstein's Equation Rejected

"A substitute amendment to be offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein would increase penalties for federal crimes against pregnant women – but would recognize only one victim, the mother, and without recognizing any loss of human life if the mother survives the assault.

Sharon Rocha, mother of Laci Peterson and grandmother of Conner Peterson, has called such a single-victim proposal “a step away from justice, not toward it.”

But what does the general public say? If a criminal assaults a woman who carries an unborn child, does that crime have two victims, or only one?"

"The bill covers children that aren't children, that are a day old in the womb," she said. "Once you give an embryo at the point of conception all of the legal rights of a human being … you've created the legal case to go against Roe vs. Wade."

Senator Diane Feinstein

Judge Casey Gets Past the Euphemisms

Three trials are underway challenging the Partial Birth Abortion Ban. In New York Judge Richard Casey pressed plaintiff Dr. Johnson with blunt questions about whether the fetus feels pain when the late term abortion procedure is performed.

"'Does the fetus feel pain?' Judge Richard C. Casey asked Johnson, saying he had been told that studies of a type of abortion usually performed in the second trimester had concluded they do.

Johnson said he did not know, adding he knew of no scientific research on the subject.
The judge then pressed Johnson on whether he ever thought about fetal pain while he performs the abortion procedure that involves dismemberment. Another doctor a day earlier had testified that a fetus sometimes does not immediately die after limbs are pulled off.

'I guess whenever I...' Johnson began before the judge interrupted.
'Simple question, doctor. Does it cross your mind?' Casey pressed.
Johnson said it did not.

'Never crossed your mind?' the judge asked again.

'No,' Johnson answered."

Singer and Cameron Find No Common Ground

Recently, several hundred people gathered to hear Dr. Cameron and Dr. Singer debate the question: Is it ever wrong to take a human life?

Singer established his critique of the sanctity-of-life position by showing that it is being abandoned in practice in such matters as the definition of death ("brain-death") and the treatment of patients in coma.

Dr. Cameron recalls the debate, "Singer said we need a fresh way to look at how we handle human life.

I rebutted with the assertion that hard cases make bad law! We know there are problem areas, grey areas, difficult cases where medicine lies at the interface of life and death.

There are cases where conscientious physicans and ethicists may disagree about how to treat patients. But that is no reason to abandon our conviction that it's only on the basis of the sanctity of life that we can make any sense of these cases - and maintain the central significance of the dignity of the individual.

To that end, I grounded my comments in the commitment of our culture to human dignity, and the fact that in areas as diverse as slavery, human rights, the dignity of women, disabled persons, and those with psychological problems, our culture has slowly, been coming to grips with the need to embrace all human beings and treat them with an equal respect."