The Oregon Legislature last week passed a bill increasing penalties for assault and murder if the perpetrator knows the victim is a pregnant woman. If Gov. Ted Kulongoski signs the bill, which is likely, the state will classify such crimes as aggravated, meaning convicts will probably serve life terms with a slim chance of parole.
The vote in the House was 58-1 and in the Senate it was 30-0. The legislation is a revised version of an earlier proposal that would have had even heavier consequences, making it a double murder to kill a woman and her unborn child.
Gayle Atteberry, executive director of Oregon Right to Life, calls the approved bill a step in the right direction, but says most Oregonians see the sense of the double-murder idea, which Democratic Senate leaders refused to authorize for debate.
Both bills were prompted by the June 5 killing of 21-year-old Heather Snively of Tigard and her unborn son. The boy, due in early July, was already named John Stephen.
The suspect, 27-year-old Korena Roberts, has been charged with one count of murder.
“There were two bodies, two victims and there should be two charges of murder,” Atteberry says, calling the revised bill “watered down.”
The rejected double murder proposal, made by Sen. Bruce Starr, carried provisions protecting doctors who perform abortions from prosecution. Still, pro-choice groups nationwide oppose what has been called “unborn victims” legislation because it legalizes the notion that unborn children are human beings with their own rights.
“The true intention of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act is to create a separate legal status for a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus, even if the woman does not know she is pregnant,” the National Abortion Rights Action League of Oregon said in 2004 after federal legislation was approved.
Atteberry says pro-choice groups and the Oregon Senate Democrats who blocked the double murder bill are guilty of extremism.
“The Democrats are so much in the grip of the pro-abortion mentality that they can’t see the good this bill brings,” says Atteberry, who promises that voters will remember the obstruction when it comes election time.
In 2005, the Oregon House did approve a bill that would allow prosecutors to charge the killers of pregnant women for two deaths, but the legislation stalled in a Senate committee.
In 36 states, such policy is law. Under current Oregon law, a child must have taken a breath in order to be considered a victim.
Chris Popp, the father of John Stephen, urged the Senate to allow the double murder bill to be debated.
“It should be an embarrassment to the courts of Oregon that John Stephen was not considered a human life,” Popp wrote, asking the lawmakers not to confuse the crime with abortion. “We have to value the choice of those who want to have families and protect those in the womb.”
Popp described putting his ear to Snively’s belly and listening to John Stephen’s heartbeat.
One member of the Legislature voted against even the revised bill. Rep. Mitch Greenlick, a Portland Democrat, led a successful health coverage expansion this year.
On boosting the assault and murder charges to aggravated status, Greenlick said that murdering a pregnant woman is no more terrible than murdering a woman who is tall, short, left-handed or right-handed.
In other pro-life news from the Legislature as it wrapped up this week, a bill that would have provided state funding for embryonic stem cell research stalled.
Catholic leaders and Oregon Right to Life opposed that legislation because human embryos are destroyed in the process.
