The nation's fetal homicide laws share a common message: Hurt a pregnant woman and you'll pay dearly.

It's an idea politicians on both sides of the aisle can get behind - in theory. But it's what's under the surface of the laws that people can't agree on. Though the surge in support for such laws stems from public tragedies such as Laci Peterson's murder, fetal homicide legislation is laden with moral land mines often linked to the heated abortion debate.

This month, the South Carolina Senate passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which charges those who assault or kill pregnant women with two crimes: one for the mother and one for her fetus. The bill now awaits a vote in the House.

In 2005, 119 fetal homicide bills were introduced in statehouses nationwide, some named for Peterson, the California woman whose husband was convicted of murdering her and their unborn son, Connor. Six of them passed, in states from Maine to Oklahoma. The laws fall into two general groups: those that make it a special, elevated crime to intentionally or knowingly assault a pregnant woman, and like South Carolina's bill, those that charge perpetrators twice.

It's not just an aggravated assault, said Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Charleston, a sponsor of the bill. "She lost her baby. It's a philosophical difference. She lost a separate being that she was nurturing and wanted to give birth to."

Opposition arises

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act is expected to sail through the House - versions of the same bill have passed there several times before - but in light of efforts to restrict abortion elsewhere in the country, reproductive rights activists are calling for extra scrutiny of the bill.

South Carolina abortion-rights groups initially supported the measure and worked with Democratic state senators to amend it, but last week a group of them withdrew support for the proposed law and asked lawmakers to rewrite it.

"At first glance, the bill almost seems harmless - you'd even think protective of women," said Christopher Hollis, vice president for governmental and political affairs for Planned Parenthood Health Systems, which operates clinics in North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia. "But vesting legal rights at the point of conception is just so dangerous on so many levels."

Hollis and other reproductive rights advocates argue that the proposed law sets the stage to deny women access to contraceptives and to hold pregnant women criminally accountable for drinking, smoking or even undergoing medical treatment that could harm their unborn child, such as chemotherapy.

It wouldn't be the first time that's happened here. In the early 1990s, 10 pregnant Charleston women were given drug tests without consent. The results were turned over to the police, and some women were threatened with jail time unless they entered drug rehabilitation - even though no residential treatment programs existed that would house the women and their children.

The women filed suit against the Medical University of South Carolina, the Charleston Police Department and the 9th Circuit Solicitor's Office. The case simmered for years and went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided the women's rights had been violated. In another state case, Regina McKnight was convicted of homicide by child abuse because her child was stillborn after she used cocaine during her pregnancy. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal.

Question of scope

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act also could muddle workers' compensation procedures for dealing with pregnant women and create new questions for estate and tax laws, according to a statement issued last week by the New Morning Foundation, a teen pregnancy prevention grant-making organization based in Columbia. Can a fetus, for instance, inherit property? Can a lawyer be appointed to represent an embryo's rights against its mother?

Some of the bill's supporters call those concerns far-fetched.

"There was nothing like that in our law whatsoever," said Holly Gatling, executive director of South Carolina Citizens for Life, which works on anti-abortion legislative initiatives. "The opponents who are militant pro-abortionists are extremely fearful that anything that recognizes an unborn child as an individual threatens Roe v. Wade."

Among states that have passed fetal homicide bills, punishment procedures vary widely.

The law Maryland passed last year, for instance, calls for imposing elevated penalties only after the fetus becomes viable, which usually happens sometime in the sixth month of pregnancy. The bill on the table in South Carolina, however, would make it a separate crime to harm a fetus at any point - potentially, even before the woman knows she's pregnant.

"The opposition's strategy is to say there are not two victims here," Gatling said. "The whole objective here is to recognize the unborn child as an individual."

To Hollis and others who oppose the bill, that's precisely the problem, and they say it's at odds with existing federal law.

Fear of the future

The South Carolina bill includes a notation that the law could not be used to prosecute anyone providing an abortion to a consenting woman, because the right to an abortion is guaranteed at least until the point of viability by the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.

But abortion-rights advocates say they worry that if rights are given to fetuses, the same law could be used to ban abortions in South Carolina if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned. It's not the only legislative effort aimed at protecting the unborn in South Carolina: Another Republican-backed bill, passed last year in the House and awaiting Senate action this term, would grant due process rights to an embryo from the moment of conception.

"There is really a strong distinction between what Maryland is trying to achieve and what South Carolina looks like it's trying to achieve," said Katherine Grainger, legislative counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, a Washington, D.C., abortion rights advocacy group. "These bills alone don't undermine Roe, but there's definitely an effort by the anti-choice community to establish that fetuses are legal people."

Reach Holly Auer at 937-5560 or hauer@postandcourier.com.