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President Bush to Sign Fetus Rights Bill

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - President Bush, eager to hand another victory to the social conservatives who make up his most loyal base of political support, decided on an elaborate ceremony to sign into law legislation expanding legal rights of the unborn.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act makes it a crime to harm a fetus during an assault on a pregnant woman. Bush was signing the bill, which took five years to get through Congress, on Thursday in the White House's East Room.

People on both sides of the fetal rights and abortion issue have said the new law will have far-reaching consequences.

Abortion opponents welcome it as a step toward more sweeping protections for the unborn, while abortion-rights proponents say the measure represents the first recognition in federal law of an embryo or fetus as a person separate from the woman.

Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites), D-Mass., Bush's opponent in this fall's election voted against the bill.

Bush has said he doesn't believe the country is ready to completely ban abortions; he opposes them except in cases of rape or incest or when pregnancy endangers a woman's life. That position has become a standard line in most of his speeches.

"We stand for a culture of life in which every person counts and every person matters. We will not stand for the treatment of any life as a commodity to be experimented upon, exploited or cloned," the president told GOP donors to his campaign at a fund-raiser in Washington Tuesday night.

Bush has taken several actions that have pleased anti-abortion advocates.

As one of the first acts of his presidency, he reinstated the "Mexico City policy" that bars U.S. money from international groups that support abortion, even with their own money, through direct services, counseling or lobbying activities.

He has signed legislation that bans certain late-term abortions and that amends legal definitions of "person," "human being," "child" and "individual" to include any fetus that survives an abortion.

He has increased federal support for abstinence education, adoption and crisis pregnancy programs; placed severe restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research to only a few existing cell lines; and extended state health coverage to "unborn children."

The measure Bush was signing into law on Thursday is limited in scope, applying only to harm to a fetus while a federal crime, such as a terrorist attack or drug-related shooting, is being committed against the pregnant mother. The legislation defines an "unborn child" as a child in utero, which it says "means a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."

A number of states have similar laws.