President George W. Bush signed a controversial bill into law on April 1 which will allow prosecutors to charge defendants with a separate offense when a fetus is killed during a federal crime committed against a pregnant woman.

Opponents of the bill have appropriately charged that the bill itself is a beginning attempt at challenging a woman’s right to choose in a roundabout manner. The authors of the bill were careful to word it in such a way that it could eventually make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court and threaten Roe v. Wade.

The ambiguous nature of the bill will undoubtedly result in a court challenge. While most definitions of a fetus maintain that a woman begins carrying a “fetus” after she has been pregnant for eight weeks, this law will define a fetus as “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb,” according to The Washington Post.

Because of the wording, an argument over whether or not the “fetus” was developed enough will surely come up. When an anti-abortion case reaches the court system, this law may now be manipulated and used by opponents of abortion to show that a fetus is defined as a person and thus a woman who has an abortion commits murder in the process.

Opponents of the law – specifically those opposed to bestowing a fetus with certain rights that may eventually challenge the right to abortion – have been put in a difficult position.

By speaking out against the bill, opponents may sound as if they are defending the perpetrators of crimes like murder and rape. But whether or not a woman is pregnant is not always obvious, and such difficulties in determining whether or not the person accused of harming both the mother and the fetus was fully aware of her being pregnant will only cause more difficulty in setting the new law in motion.

Whether or not abortion should be legal is not a new debate. Bush has been very outspoken against a woman’s right to choose and it is no surprise that he signed the bill into law. But this is not the right approach to address the issue of abortion.

If Bush wants to take away a woman’s right to choose, they must go about that issue directly – not by tiptoeing around it. The new law does not legally ban abortion, but it is clear what it was intended to eventually do.

This law is not necessary and in the end it will cause more harm than good. There is already enough leeway in the legal system that influences both the charges pressed against someone accused of harming a pregnant woman and the sentences given to those convicted. Should a pregnant woman be murdered, a law already exists stating that murdering her was illegal. The fact of the matter is that someone was killed and the person responsible must be dealt with accordingly – regardless of who it was that was killed.

The bill was clearly designed with political intentions and should not have been signed into law. If abortion opponents want to challenge the practice, they should come right out and do it instead of trying to make loopholes.