another skirmish

Time will tell, but something that transpired in the Senate late this afternoon may prove to be of historic significance.

The Senate passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act on Thursday, following House passage last month of a bill that would make it a crime to harm a fetus during a violent federal crime. […]

The bill states that an assailant who attacks a pregnant woman while committing a violent federal crime can be prosecuted for separate offenses against both the woman and her unborn child, “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.”

“This bill recognizes that there are two victims. There is the victim, the mother who was assaulted, and there is the victim, the unborn child: He was either injured or killed,” said Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio. […]

The Senate cleared the way for passage of the bill by narrowly defeating an amendment, 50-49, that would have given more comfort to abortion rights lawmakers. The measure would have increased penalties on assailants but maintained that an attack on a pregnant victim was a single-victim crime.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who authored the amendment, feared the implications of the bill. “If this result is incorporated, it will be the first step in removing a woman's right to choice,” she said. Feinstein said it could also chill embryonic stem cell research.

The aging feminist ought indeed to fear the implications. It is possible to assent to the definitions given in this bill and still advocate abortion on demand, but in so doing one runs the risk of severe cognitive dissonance. Though not necessarily: Camille Paglia, for one, is willing to label abortion as murder, even as she remains adamantly pro-choice. But Paglia's brutal honesty is rare among abortion proponents (or for that matter, among public intellectuals of all persuasions).

The single outstanding feature of this law is that it will accord a measure of federal recognition to unborn persons—something once taken for granted, though no longer in a society whose elites scoff at the very notion of natural law. It is an odd and terrible thing that questions of such ontic import can be decided by the votes of a few.

Especially when in many instances those votes are based on so naked a political calculus.

Let's take roll.