House Democrats Almost Unanimously Oppose Bill to Protect Babies Born Alive after Abortion

O n Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 220–210 to pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

Only one House Democrat, Henry Cuellar of Texas, voted for the bill, while no Republicans opposed it.

What possible reason did Democrats other than Cuellar have for voting against a bill protecting living babies who are entirely outside the womb?

New York congressman Jerrold Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who managed the floor debate on the bill on Wednesday, said the bill mandates the immediate transfer of the infant to a hospital, and that mandate could endanger the life of a child who would be better cared for where he or she was delivered (by the abortionist who just failed to kill the infant).

“The problem with this bill is not that it . . . provides any new protections for infants,” Nadler said. “The problem with this bill is that it endangers some infants [born alive] by stating that that infant must immediately be brought to the hospital.”

But Nadler did not correctly describe the law. The text of the legislation states that any health-care practitioner present at the time when a child is born must do two things. First, the health-care practitioner must “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.” Second — and only after such “skill, care, and diligence” are exercised — the health-care practitioner must “ensure that the child born alive is immediately transported and admitted to a hospital.”

So, Nadler is wrong: The law first and foremost requires the attending health-care practitioner to stabilize and treat the infant as a “reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would,” and that would preclude ordering a dangerous ambulance ride.

House Democrats made at least three other flawed arguments against the legislation on Wednesday.

First, they said that the bill is superfluous because Congress unanimously passed the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act” in 2002. But that 2002 law contained no penalties for failing to provide proper care to an infant born alive after an abortion. It simply said that, for purposes of federal law and regulations, a child born after an attempted abortion counts as a person.

Second, House Democrats argued that the new legislation is unnecessary because murder is illegal in every state. While it is true that it would be illegal in every state for an abortionist to actively kill a child after she was born alive — with, say, scissors, as Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell did countless times — the law is unclear in many states when it comes to neglecting to provide care to a child born alive after an abortion.

As the Charlotte Lozier Institute explains:

Only 18 states have laws offering robust protections to babies who survive abortions, although others have recently taken steps to strengthen their laws. However, many of the states with the most extreme abortion laws do not afford such protection to born-alive babies. Alaska, Colorado, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia all permit abortion at any time for any reason, yet none of these states has established legal protections for born-alive infants. Some states like New York and Illinois have even enacted laws that eliminated previous protections for babies born alive.

Third, House Democrats argued that the bill sought to address a nonexistent problem — such cases don’t really happen, and no medical professional would let a child die if the child could be saved. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is aware of 143 cases of infants who were born alive and died following abortions between 2003 and 2014, and the agency acknowledged that number could be an underestimation. A CDC official estimated in 1981 that “400 to 500 abortion live births” occurred every year but were mostly swept under the rug. In 2013, an abortionist in Washington, D.C., was caught on tape saying that if a baby were born alive at 24 weeks, he would allow the child to suffocate to death: “We would not help it. We wouldn’t intubate.”

So, yes, it is true that only a tiny percentage of late-term abortions result in live births, and, yes, it is true that all late-term abortions amount to about 1 percent of all abortions.

But the effort to dismiss these cases as exceedingly rare only makes sense if one thinks the tolerable number of infanticides is greater than zero.