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today the House is scheduled to take up H.R.2175, the Born-Alive
Infants Protection Act.
The bill is
expected to pass, with no help from the media, of course. The Congressional
Quarterly's Daily Monitor, widely read by Hill staff and
advocacy groups who need to know what's coming up when, etc., had
an item yesterday on the bill. "Fetuses Born Alive" was
the headline.
The unsigned
piece warns that the bill "would define a fetus that is fully
outside the woman's body as having been 'born alive' for the purposes
of federal law, thereby guaranteeing the fetus legal protections."
CQ Daily
Monitor warns that supporters of the law "say it is needed
to prevent fetuses partially delivered as part [of] an abortion
procedure from being deliberately destroyed." Throughout the
piece, the word "fetus" is used. But the bill has nothing
to do with fetuses.
The piece goes
on to explain that "abortion opponents say the bill would discourage
a kind of late-term procedure they call a 'partial-birth' abortion."
The bill does
no such thing. As Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life
Committee points out, "The bill clearly has no application
to 'partly delivered' babies." The bill is much more of a no-brainer
than that. It simply would make it so that once a baby is outside
of its mother, it's entitled to the legal protection afforded to
any other American. A baby who survives a botched abortion attempt
would then be a person in the eyes of the law.
Here's the
language in the legislation before the House today:
The term
"born alive," with respect to a member of the species
homo sapiens, means the complete expulsion or extraction from
his or her mother of that member, at any stage of development,
who after such expulsion or extraction breathes or has a beating
heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of
voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has
been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction
occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section,
or induced abortion.
Some critics
of the bill-those who aren't claiming it prohibits abortion-say
that this is a principle already at work, that doctors and parents
are typically prone to save the life of a baby who has clearly been
born. But that's not something that can be taken for granted.
Nurse Jill
Stanek has testified extensively to what has become known as "live-birth
abortion." It isn't really abortion at all, however. She witnessed
the brutal practice at Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak
Lawn, Illinois, where she was employed: Children are delivered and
simply purposely left unattended, to die. These are cases where
it is clear that the baby is a baby and he is very much alive.
In congressional
testimony last year, Stanek said:
One night,
a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted Down syndrome baby who
was born alive to our soiled utility room because his parents
did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him.
I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone
in a soiled utility room, so I cradled and rocked him for the
45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about
half a pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to
move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe.
Toward the end he was so quiet that I couldn't tell if he was
still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart
was still beating through his chest wall.
The bill is
what its father, NRO contributor Hadley Arkes, calls the "most
modest first step imaginable on the issue of abortion." To
oppose the bill is to affirm that the right to choose includes the
right to have a dead baby-even if that means having it killed. Of
course, in the age of "wrongful birth" suits this isn't
foreign. In fact, it's almost a surprise that there is still some
sense of shock or general disapproval at what Stanek testifies to.
You don't have
to come in on the same page on whether life begins at conception
or not here. Can't we all-Peter Singer excepted — agree it
begins at birth?
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