Real Life
Making birth legal.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez
March 12, 2002, 11:05 a.m.

ater 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?