And this is when I'm feeling charitable

Lying, hypocritical, scum-sucking, subhuman dirtbags. That's what they are.

Washington (AP, March 26) - In a major win for social conservatives, Congress is sending to the president legislation that would expand the legal rights of the unborn by making it a separate crime to harm a fetus during an assault on a pregnant woman.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act cleared the Senate on a 61-38 vote Thursday, a month after the House passed the bill and five years after conservatives first tried to move the legislation through Congress.

The bill, that is, puts the fetus on an equal legal footing with the woman. Indeed, it puts the zygote on an equal footing, since it says that "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development [emphasis added], who is carried in the womb" is an "unborn child."

And after the vote, after the belly-crawlers spent a great deal of energy claiming that this did not in any way affect abortion rights, that in fact it had nothing whatsoever to do with abortion and how could you even think such a thing, after the smarmy lies and the shameless exploitation of the Laci Peterson murder, then and only then did Tony Perkins, president of the reactionary barefoot-and-pregnant cabal called the Family Research Council, say that

with the president's signature, "our nation will be one giant step closer to rebuilding a culture of life, where every child, born and unborn, is given the protections they so clearly deserve."

Contemptible. Contemptible, but in line with the case of Melissa Ann Rowland, charged in Utah earlier this month with murder because one of her twins was born dead after, prosecutors claim, she refused doctors' advice to have a Caesarian section. That, they charge, constituted "depraved indifference" to the health of her "unborn children."

The result of a successful prosecution well could be to criminalize as "child endangerment" any refusal or failure of a pregnant woman to do exactly as she's told by physicians, putting her back in the position of being a subordinate baby-machine rather than an adult human being.

And that, after all, may be exactly the idea.

Footnote: For those who keep track of such things, John Kerry interrupted his campaign to vote in favor of an unsuccessful substitute bill that would have made injury to a fetus an aggravating factor in the assault on the woman rather than a separate crime and the fetus a separate victim. It failed on a 50-49 vote. He then voted against the final bill.