"About 38 states have laws allowing parents to sue for the wrongful death of a fetus, according to lawyers. Whether those laws could be extended to include embryos has been a lingering question for lawyers.

Most state laws have been directed at embryonic testing. California, Louisiana, Michigan, Rhode Island and Virginia have all passed statutes barring human cloning, and nine states have banned all experiments conducted on human embryos, according to medical journals.

In some states, like Missouri and Louisiana, an embryo has legal rights assigned to it from the moment of creation....  In Virginia, legal counsel must be assigned to an embryo if it is being tested."

(Source:  Dee McAree, "Wrongful death suit allowed over embryo," The National Law Journal, February 18, 2005; http://www.nlj.com/; http://biz.yahoo.com/law/050218/76522cf9799607d3f234c436aaab1e95_1.html.)

"In an opinion issued Friday, Cook County Judge Jeffrey Lawrence said 'a pre-embryo is a "human being"...whether or not it is implanted in its mother's womb.'

....In his ruling, Lawrence relied on the state's Wrongful Death Act, which allows lawsuits to be filed if unborn fetuses are killed in an accident or assault. 'The state of gestation or development of a human being' does not preclude taking legal action, the act says.

Lawrence also cited an Illinois state law that says an 'unborn child is a human being from the time of conception and is, therefore, a legal person.'

'There is no doubt in the mind of the Illinois Legislature when life begins,' Lawrence wrote."

(Source:  The Associated Press, "Judge OKs discarded embryo lawsuit," CNN, February 5, 2005; http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/02/05/frozen.embryo.lawsuit.ap/.)

Some politicians defend their reluctance to press the abortion issue, claiming that they want to see changes in the culture before they impose restrictions on abortion. Yet the notion that only a cultural shift - not the law - can drive abortion rates down flies in the face of a study at the Heritage Foundation by political scientist Michael J. New. His regression analysis links the reversal of abortion rates and ratios during the 1990s to the enactment or greater enforcement of state-level pro-life legislation during the same period.

New studied the relationship between four state policies and state abortion statistics from 1985 to 2000 supplied by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Allan Guttmacher Institute (AGI). The state policies measured included parental-involvement laws, informed-consent laws (requiring the giving of information about abortion to women seeking one), restrictions on Medicaid funding of abortions, and partial-birth abortion bans. The abortion data from each source represented two measures: the number of abortions per 1,000 live births (the abortion ratio) and the number of abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age (the abortion rate).

His 16 regressions found that each of the four policy measures had reduced abortions in the states that had adopted or were enforcing such policies. Medicaid funding restrictions yielded the largest reduction in abortion rates and ratios (p < .01 for each of the four data sets). Using the CDC data, states with Medicaid restrictions reduced the abortion ratio by 29.66 per 1,000 live births and the abortion rate by 2.62 abortions for 1,000 women (the respective AGI numbers were 32.40 and 1.57).

Informed-consent laws, adopted by 20 states between 1992 and 1999, also yielded statistically significant reductions with each of the data sets. Using the CDC data, such laws reduced the abortion ratio by 11.69 per 1,000 live births and the abortion rate by 0.92 per 1,000 women (the AGI data showed even greater reductions of 22.46 and 1.57, respectively). Partial-birth laws, which went into effect in 12 states in 1997 or 1998, yielded similar effects with the AGI data. The parental involvement laws yielded the smallest and statistically insignificant effects, which the researcher claims is because such laws apply only to minors, a small fraction of the total number of women seeking abortions.

While former President Bill Clinton might be tempted to take credit for the 17.4 percent decline in abortions under his watch, New's findings remind Americans that pro-life legislation in the states delivered these impressive results, not the president who fought such legislation at the national level.