The Senate is currently debating the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act on the floor and will vote on the legislation later this evening. The bill, sponsored by Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) requires that doctors provide medical care to infants born alive after attempted abortion procedures.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell opened the session, saying of the bill, “It isn’t about restrictions on abortion. It isn’t about changing the options available to women. It’s just about recognizing that a newborn baby is a newborn baby, period.”
“Can the extreme far-left politics surrounding abortion really have come this far?” McConnell added. “Are we really supposed to think that it’s normal that there are now two sides debating whether a newborn, whether newborn living babies deserve medical attention?”
Shortly after McConnell’s remarks, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said on the Senate floor that the born-alive bill “is carefully crafted to target, intimidate, and shut down reproductive health care providers.” He also claimed the bill “would impose requirements on what type of care doctors must provide in certain circumstances, even if that care is ineffective, contradictory to medical evidence, and against the family’s wishes.”
In fact, the bill doesn’t mandate any particular type of care for infants, and the medical specifics are left up to the judgment of the physician in each case. Instead, it enacts a requirement that newborns delivered in the context of abortion be afforded “the same degree” of care that “any other child born alive at the same gestational age” would receive.
“I urge the American people, do you own research. Read the bill. See what it says,” Schumer added later.
In a response to the Senate minority leader, Sasse delivered remarks on the floor and encouraged his Democratic colleagues to bring the bill to the floor and show where in the text it limits abortion in any way.
“This language is too blunt for many people in this body,” Sasse said. “Infanticide is what the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act is actually about. Are we a country that protects babies that are born alive, outside the womb, after surviving a botched abortion? . . . This bill is not actually about anything that limits abortion.”