Video: Graham on fetal homicide law
Republican candidate for governor Bill Graham put out a call for a fetal homicide law in North Carolina today. (Click here for the news release.) The call was inspired, he said, largely by the case of a pregnant marine who went missing recently and was eventually found dead. The family of woman killed in another high profile case has called for such a law. Background from NCSL here.
One reason that people object to fetal homicide laws is that they fear it is a gateway to making abortion illegal. The logic goes that if you can be punished for killing an unborn child by killing the mother, that's not such a large leap from any situation in which a fetus is killed.
Graham says there can be "medical exceptions" drafted into the legislation that would avoid that debate.
North Carolina law says that if someone knowingly harms a pregnant woman in the commission of a crime and that leads to a stillbirth or miscarriage, the perpetrator can be prosecuted under a higher felony level - essentially the person can be punished more severely. But it is only an element of the same crime, not a separate charge.
Graham was already scheduled to stop by my office this morning so this was pretty much the first thing I asked him about. I have two bits of video for you. In part one, I asked him about the law and suggested he might get some push-back on it because of the abortion angle:
This was the answer to a follow up question I asked about fetal homicide laws being gateways to outright abortion bans:
So far, Graham's campaign has focused on economic issues: lowering taxes, building roads, lowering the high school dropout rate (yes, that's an economic issue). This is his first foray into the social policy arena and may win him some attention from more conservative Republicans who want to hear about that basket of issues in addition to taxes.