This from the mouths of MPs on both sides of the C-510 (Roxanne’s Law) debate.
One young female MP claims the bill is a “front to attack a women’s right to choose.” A spokesperson from the National Abortion Federation calls it a “bad bill” and “anti-choice.” Words designed to carry heavy negative associations but that essentially don’t say anything in relation to C-510.
Neither of these “arguments” point to specifics of the bill they disagree with, because opponents actually can’t find fault with bill itself. Instead, they elect to disagree on the basis of what it could potentially be rather than what it is. Which is interesting, because traditionally pro-abortionists don’t give any value to potentiality.
The spokesperson for the NAF does concede that violence against women increases during pregnancy, and it is this specific situation of violence during pregnancy that the bill sets out to criminalize. As the bill sponsor Rod Bruinooge points out, we have specified laws for sexual harassment because of its unique nature, and this bill seeks to do the same with domestic violence towards pregnant women. A similar bill has been passed in the US, without threatening a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion.
On the night of February 8, 1992, Glendale Black had a fight with his pregnant wife. Tracy Marciniak, his wife, was nine months pregnant and due to deliver their son in only four days. They had already given their son a name: Zachariah. Tracy was eager to have her baby and anxious for the day to arrive. Glendale, however, flew into a rage that night and decided that that day would never come. He killed their child.
He punched Tracy in the stomach. Hard. And then he punched her again.
Tracy was severely injured, and Zachariah began to bleed to death in her womb. She begged her husband to dial 911, but he refused. When she reached for the phone herself, he kept it away from her.
Eventually, he relented. Tracy was rushed to the hospital and delivered Zachariah by Caesarean section. He was dead. Tracy herself was on the verge of death, but was saved by her doctors.
Glendale Black was arrested. But in 1992 killing an unborn baby was not a crime. Black was convicted of assault and nothing more.
On August 26, 1999, three men attacked Shiwona Pace in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was due to deliver her baby the very next day. Knowing her baby would be a girl, she named her Heaven Lashay. But her former boyfriend, Erik Bullock, paid three men $400 to kill Heaven the day before she was to be born.
Shiwona lay sobbing and begging for mercy on the floor while the hit men brutally beat her, choked her, and clubbed her with a gun. They kicked her in the abdomen repeatedly, killing her child who was to be delivered the very next day. One of them shouted, “—- you! Your baby is dying tonight!”
Unlike Tracy Marciniak, Shiwona Pace saw Bullock and her assailants go to prison for killing her daughter. Only a month before, Arkansas had passed legislation making the killing of an unborn child a prosecutable offense. If Erik Bullock had hired those killers only a month before, they would have gotten away with manslaughter.
The House of Representatives is voting this week to make the killing of an unborn baby a crime if it happens in a federal jurisdiction. The measure, called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, has the support of the House, the Senate, and the President. This is an uncontroversial bill that has passed the House before by wide margins. Abortions, protected by Roe v. Wade, are specifically exempted.
I call this a similar bill, because coercing a women into an abortion essentially forces her into the role of a hired hit man.
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