(The Center Square) – The U.S. House passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act this week by a vote of 220-210.
Sponsored by Rep. Ann Wagner, R-MO, all Republicans voted for it. Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo, Texas, voted with Republicans. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat representing the Rio Grande Valley, voted “present.”
Babies that survived an abortion are considered a legal person and entitled to protections of all U.S. laws, according to the bill, which would require abortion facilities and medical providers to provide medical care to babies born alive after a failed abortion as they would any other newborn.
The bill states, “Any health care practitioner present at the time the child is born alive shall (A) exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age; and (B) following the exercise of skill, care, and diligence required under subparagraph (A), ensure that the child born alive is immediately transported and admitted to a hospital.”
HR 26 would also impose penalties for those who don’t comply, including being subject to civil liability and criminal charges, fines and up to five years in prison.
Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Florida, the bill’s co-sponsor, said the measure isn’t about abortion but “about children who have been born and are fighting to survive despite an abortion attempt.” She said current law “fails to outline any requirements of care after an infant is born alive,” which the bill rectifies by requiring health-care practitioners “to provide life-saving care” to an infant and transport it to a hospital. “I honestly do not understand what is so controversial about that,” she said.
But Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, said the bill doesn’t provide any “new protection for infants” but rather “endangers some infants by stating that that infant must immediately be brought to the hospital. Under any other circumstances that may be the right thing to do for the health and survival of that infant or it may not. It directs certain medical care, which may not be appropriate, which may endanger the life of an infant in certain circumstances.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, said “the vote made clear Republicans were going to do everything they can to impose a nationwide ban on abortion, detonate reproductive freedom, criminalize abortion care, and impose government mandated pregnancies on the American people. … That’s this week in extreme MAGA Republican-land.”
Jeffries also said the Democrats “remain committed to finding common ground and to solving problems the American people care about.”
According to a 2019 poll, 77% of Americans said they support legislation to ensure a baby born alive from a failed abortion be given the same medical treatment as a prematurely born baby; 55% said they strongly support it.
Another 62% said they oppose legislation legalizing late-term abortion, including abortions up to birth; 50% said they strongly oppose it.
Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Michigan, who says she is a “pro-choice Christian,” argued that the Bible justifies abortion. Citing Jeremiah 1:5 (“I knew you before I formed you and I placed you in your mother’s womb), she says, it “doesn’t say the government’s womb or the speaker’s womb. … I reject the idea if I embrace the sanctity of life I also must be forced to invite the federal government in to regulate it. We must protect families from unnecessary government intrusion.”
Critics argue Scholten’s argument is a misuse of Biblical text, otherwise known as proof-texting, when people use a passage from the Bible to make it mean something it doesn’t to justify an argument they want to make. Multiple Biblical texts support both the sanctity of life and the role of the civil magistrate to protect it, scholars have argued.
Another problem with this argument, and others like it, Mat Staver, chairman and founder of Liberty Counsel, told The Center Square, is that “those who advocate that abortion is permissible” misusing biblical text “is they assume that opposition to abortion is solely a Christian-based idea. That is false. With or without anything from the Bible, abortion is wrong based on science and a general (or even a natural law) respect for human life.”
Over 30,000 medical professionals from the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American College of Pediatricians, Christian Medical & Dental Associations, Catholic Medical Association and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, supported the bill.
In a statement, they said, “There is no scientific or legal reason to distinguish between human beings born after an attempted abortion and human beings born after attempted live birth. In cases where the mother’s life actually is in danger in the latter half of pregnancy, there is not time for an abortion. … We can, and do, save the life of the mother through delivery of an intact infant in a hospital where both the mother and her newborn can receive the care that they need. There is no medical reason to intentionally kill that fetal human being.”
From 2003-2014, in only eight states that report this data, 143 babies were born alive after an attempted abortion, according to CDC data.
