Oregon bill brings abortion into the spotlight

SALEM – Sponsors of competing bills that would make people who kill pregnant women subject to the death penalty are clashing over how to classify an unborn child.

And those who favor abortion rights say one of the bills is actually aimed at chipping away at those rights.

A bill sponsored by Democrats, many of whom have opposed capital punishment in the past, would toughen penalties for violent crime against a pregnant woman, and could result in the death penalty for murder. Currently only aggravated murder cases can result in the death penalty.

A Republican-sponsored bill, modeled after the 30-year-old California law Scott Peterson was convicted under, would create one count of violent crime for the mother and another for her unborn child.

Senate Majority Leader Kate Brown, D-Portland, said at a news conference Thursday that her bill has a broader focus on domestic violence against pregnant women than the one sponsored by Republicans.

“It increases assault charges as well,” Brown said.

Critics of the Republican-sponsored bill say it’s a step toward defining a fetus as a person, with the eventual goal of outlawing abortion.

“It isn’t focused on the pregnant woman,” said Nancy Bennett, of Planned Parenthood of the Columbia-Willamette. “It seems to me that they’re trying to exploit these types of situations.”

But House and Senate Republicans deny the accusation.

“This is not about legal abortion,” said Senator Ted Ferrioli, R-John Day. Legal abortions are exempt from the bill, and Ferrioli denied that the bill was a building block for future legislation guaranteeing human rights to a fetus. He said the bill drafted by Brown falls short because it does not create separate charges for harming an unborn child, it only increases the severity of the crime.

Victims’ families don’t just mourn their wives or daughters, “they’re also losing the promise of the baby, and there should be a recognition for that,” in the form of an additional charge, said Charles Deister, spokesman for House Speaker Karen Minnis, R-Wood Village.

It’s uncertain whether either bill will make it out of the 2005 Legislature, which begins Monday, because a Republican-controlled House has favored anti-abortion legislation in the past that the Senate, now controlled by Democrats, has opposed. The Republican-backed bill also faces an additional challenge because Gov. Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, supports abortion rights.

Abortion issues aside, the competing bills have drawn criticism from death penalty opponents, such as Kathy Pugh of Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Pugh said if the intent is to protect pregnant women from domestic abuse, funding would be more effective than the death sentence. “Money is needed for that cause, and the death penalty uses up that money,” Pugh said.