Whether the congresswoman intended it or not.
“Every day, Black birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don’t believe our pain,” Democratic Missouri representative Cori Bush tweeted in summary of her testimony yesterday. “My children almost became a statistic. I almost became a statistic.”
Bush received plenty of well-earned derision for using the phrase “Black birthing people,” which is not only preposterously unscientific but sounds like something a misogynistic, white Identitarian might call black women.
The Moloch cultists at NARAL came to Bush’s defense:
When we talk about birthing people, we’re being inclusive. It’s that simple. We use gender neutral language when talking about pregnancy, because it’s not just cis-gender women that can get pregnant and give birth. Reproductive freedom is for *every* body.
Well not, every body. This inclusivity does not extend to hundreds of thousands of defenseless human beings every year. And what’s largely been ignored about Bush’s “birthing people” testimony is that she actually gave — whether the congresswoman intended it or not — a quite powerful pro-life speech.
Bush tells us about how she suffered through an illness-filled pregnancy. After her complaints were ignored by doctors, her son Zion (now 21) was born prematurely at 23 weeks, one pound three ounces, with his ears still in his skull and his eyelids still fused together. The baby’s skin was translucent. He could fit in the palm of her hand. The doctors, Bush says, told her that Zion had no chance of surviving. The baby was on a ventilator the first month of his life.
After Zion, Bush was soon pregnant again, and in the 16th week, she once more knew something was wrong. She was again in preterm labor. Bush says the doctors implored her, “Just go home, and let the baby abort.” Bush demanded they act, and a new doctor saved her pregnancy and thus the life of her daughter, Angel (now 20).
Bush is right to be angered by doctors who are indifferent to her unborn children. Yet, imagine if those doctors told her those children weren’t really a “life,” and could be dispensed with for convenience? In some places, there are more black babies aborted than born. That’s another thing both misogynistic, white Identitarians and NARAL can get behind.
Though it’s difficult to know the exact number, somewhere around 10,000 late-term abortions are performed on viable babies who could otherwise survive outside the womb every year. The number of near-viable babies — babies whom science will soon be able to save outside the womb — accounts for thousands more.
This is properly described as infanticide. And no matter how many times the myth is repeated, the vast majority of late abortions are not performed to save the mother’s life. The Charlotte Lozier Institute found that both medical literature and late-term abortion providers show that the majority of late-term procedures are not performed for “maternal health complications or lethal fetal anomalies discovered late in pregnancy.” Even the Guttmacher Institute found that a majority of women who seek these abortions “are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.”
And this year Democrats dispensed with the Hyde amendment, which banned taxpayer dollars from directly funding those abortions. Then again, Bush’s party does not support a single limitation on abortion — not one, from conception to the last hour of pregnancy. Democrats wouldn’t even back the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, not an abortion bill but rather one that protects babies who survive the barbaric procedure. Ben Sasse’s bill would have required “any health care practitioner present” to help ensure “that the child born alive is immediately transported and admitted to a hospital” and to “exercise the same degree of professional skill” he or she would use with any other baby.
All of which sounds exactly like the kind of care Bush was demanding her babies get.