Marshall Pushes 'Personhood' Bill in GA

By Hannah Hess, Virginia Statehouse News Monday, January 23, 2012

RICHMOND - Ask Delegate Bob Marshall, R-Prince William, about the origins of his zeal for anti-abortion legislation, and he will take you back to the Napoleonic Code — the law governing France in the early 1800s.

When President Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana from the French, the land was governed under the code, which criminalized abortion once a woman could feel her fetus move, he said.

American scholar Sir Edward Livingston, of Louisiana, rewrote the French code to "apply the criminal penalties against induced abortion” at any point after conception, Marshall said Friday.

Jefferson thought Livingston was a genius, Marshall said, and the conservative lawmaker agrees.

In November, Mississippi voters overwhelmingly defeated a ballot initiative that would have, like Livingston’s rewrite of the code, declared that life begins at fertilization. Supporters had hoped the initiative would prompt a legal challenge to abortion rights nationwide.

But less than two weeks after 55 percent of Mississippi voters said ‘no,’ Marshall revived the issue by proposing that the word “person” in Virginia law be construed to include unborn children.

“We require third-graders in Virginia to learn, under our public school standards of learning, that human life begins at conception,” Marshall said. “So that really isn’t controversial.”

Throughout his 20-year career in the House, Marshall has been a tireless advocate against women’s rights to abortion, filing multiple bills to criminalize the procedure.

Last year, he filed a bill to guarantee constitutional rights to unborn children that passed the House 62-36, but the measure was never called for a vote in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Like many pieces of anti-abortion legislation, it stalled in the Senate Education and Health Committee.

But this year, Republicans have the power to stack committees with lawmakers more open to the legislation.

Marshall said Thursday the fate of his bill would likely be in the hands of the 15 senators who may or may not approve of his so-called “personhood” bill. Although Republicans outnumber Democrats 8-7, he said he is still unsure about the outcome.

Opponents are gearing up for battle against the “personhood” law, which would grant a cluster of fertilized cells all of the rights afforded people under Virginia’s constitution.

Delegate David Englin, D-Alexandria, vowed this week that the Progressive Caucus and “many others beyond this caucus, who take a more reasonable, moderate, mainstream view of things, that we are going to be working very hard against that amendment.”

Women’s rights advocates fear the impact of the bill would be far-reaching enough to criminalize common forms of birth control, and lay the groundwork for overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

“It will criminalize the decisions that the mother, the father and the doctor have to make,” said Delegate Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, who warned that the bill could affect medical procedures used to complete a miscarriage.

Courtney Jones, a grassroots field organizer for Planned Parenthood Virginia and an advocate of reproductive rights, said 98 percent of women will use birth control at some point in their lives, and could potentially be affected by the legislation.

“This is not a Republican matter, not a religious matter, but a matter of planning healthy families,” Jones said. “This is a direct assault on women’s rights in America.”

Marshall refutes critics' claims.

The immediate effect of the legislation would be to give cells property ownership and other legal rights from the moment of fertilization, he said, in effect allowing an unborn child to inherit property.

If a pregnant woman was killed in a car accident, under his law, Marshall said, the driver would be liable for the death of two people.

He called the protests of Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights activists a “sideshow” based on inaccurate information. Missouri has had similar laws on the books since 1989, he said, and no one has prosecuted abortion as illegal or stripped away birth control.

But Marshall said the “personhood” bill would give the state the “constitutional backbone to go back to old laws which criminalized abortion,” if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

The bill, HB1, is before the House Courts of Justice Committee. Click here to read it.