Nnnnnoooooo

The U.S. Senate passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Bill. It is expected that Bush will sign it (I can find no evidence that he has already, but it's not reasonable to hope he wouldn't).

''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.

Feinstein said that by defining when life begins, the bill was "the first step in removing a woman's right to choice, particularly in the early months of a pregnancy before viability." She said it could also chill embryonic stem cell research.

"This would be the first time in federal law that an embryo or fetus is recognized as a separate and distinct person under the law, separate from the woman,'' said NARAL president Kate Michelman. "Much of this is preparing for the day the Supreme Court has a majority that will overrule Roe v. Wade.''

President Bush has some trouble keeping his religion separate from our state. From a recent article regarding stem cell research:

In a sense, then, Bush is boxed in by his own moral decision, and so are we all. He is committed to his line of thinking, whatever the cost. As the bioethics council points out in its report, Tommy Thompson, Bush's secretary of health and human services, has actually said that "neither unexpected scientific breakthroughs nor unanticipated research problems would cause Bush to reconsider" his policy, because it is based on "a high moral line that this president is not going to cross."

Is a 5-day-old human embryo actually new life? The council got nowhere near reaching consensus on the question. Instead, it found only unbridgeable differences . . . One is left feeling that the moral status of embryos will probably forever remain in dispute, constantly eluding compromise.

Sadly, that moral status may be constitutionally ingrained before anyone's looking.