New Utah Law Holds Women Criminally Liable for Illegal Abortions

(March 10) -- In Utah, women who seek out illegal abortions can now be charged with criminal homicide.

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert on Monday signed the controversial law that allows women to be charged "for killing an unborn child."

The push for the legislation began after a 17-year-old caused an outcry in May when she paid a man $150 to beat her in the stomach in the hopes of ending her pregnancy. A Utah judge said the girl could not be prosecuted because there was no law holding women responsible for the death of their fetus. So Republican state Rep. Carl Wimmer introduced legislation to put an end to such acts, which he has called "heinous."

Wimmer says he is "extremely happy" with the legislation. In a phone interview Wednesday afternoon, the representative, who describes himself as "unapologetically pro-life," told AOL News that he plans to cite the law at national conferences on abortion as "model legislation that other states can adopt."

The case that inspired the law may be exceptional, but it could have a widespread effect on abortion rights. The legislation is the first in the country to hold a woman criminally liable for the death of her fetus.

And critics say it goes too far.

"It's pretty extreme to target the women themselves and to criminalize behavior during their pregnancy," said Jordan Goldberg of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion rights group. He said that while the case of the 17-year-old girl was "tragic," education and better access to legal abortion would have been a better way to address the issue. "The fact that she was desperate enough to pay someone to beat her means the answer wasn't to lock her up," Goldberg said in a phone interview.

But Wimmer rejects this conclusion. "That's a straw-man argument," he said, referring to calls by abortion rights advocates for increased sex education. "If you look at Utah and their pregnancy rate, we are one of the lowest in the nation and we have an abstinence-based and abstinence-only education."

But the editorial board of The New York Times wasn't happy either. "The law still raises concern about zealous prosecutors using a woman's difficult choices to open an investigation," they wrote Wednesday.

Thirty-eight states, including New York and California, have fetal homicide laws on the books. But according to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, these laws are intended to criminalize "fetuses killed by violent acts against pregnant women," not by the woman herself.

Earlier this month, Herbert vetoed the bill because it included language about "reckless behavior" that many believed was too strong and could result in women being prosecuted for having a miscarriage. In his veto, The Salt Lake Tribune reports, Herbert said the new bill "is more consistent with the true intent of the legislation and addresses those situations in which the termination of a pregnancy is intentional and is not conducted at a physician's direction."

But abortion rights groups say the intent of the Utah law is not to criminalize rare and obviously "heinous" cases like that of the 17-year-old, but rather to limit access to legal abortion. And many say anti-abortion groups have been re-energized by a 2007 Supreme Court decision that ruled that bans on what opponents call partial-birth abortion were constitutional.