Earlier this month, during the presidential debate, GOP nominee Donald Trump was vigorously fact-checked by the moderators after he alleged that, under Democrats, abortion law would be such that children born alive during the procedure wouldn’t be afforded medical care and allowed to die.
The fact-check came as Trump vaguely referenced comments by former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who started a series of controversies regarding abortion that almost led to his ouster — although, rather strangely, for the subsequent revelation that he had once donned blackface and not for his remarks on abortion — in 2019.
Northam, a pediatric neurologist by profession, was asked about a bill proposed by Democrats that would allow abortions well into the third trimester during an interview on WTOP radio.
“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable,” he said, adding that a “discussion” would be had with the parents.
“The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother,” Northam added.
During the debate, this is what Trump had to say: “[Northam] said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.”
Later on in the debate, after Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent, refused to support any limits on abortion, Trump referenced Northam again: “You could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month … And probably after birth. Just look at the governor, former governor of Virginia. The governor of Virginia said we put the baby aside and then we determine what we want to do with the baby.”
Linsey Davis, one of the moderators of the debate, bluntly shot him down in a “fact-check” after his first invocation of Northam: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
But is that really true? To be clear, there’s no state in the union where one has the ability to actively end a child’s life. However, as anyone knows, there are sins or crimes of commission and sins or crimes of omission: that is to say, to do wrong actively and to do wrong passively.
And let’s be clear: There’s ample evidence to indicate that life-saving care has been denied to babies born alive during botched abortions. Moreover, Democrats have repeatedly blocked legislation that would provide protection to babies born alive.
“Current law does not adequately protect infants born alive after a failed abortion. Although President George W. Bush signed the Born-Alive Infant Survivors Protection Act into law in 2002, which recognized that all babies born alive are ‘persons,’ the law does not provide adequate protections for these babies or establish specific requirements of care on practitioners,” the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation noted in a 2019 fact-sheet on the matter in support of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.
That bill, which would require health care practitioners to “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of a child” who was delivered alive after an attempted abortion as they “would render to any other child born alive,” has repeatedly failed to clear Congress, for reasons we’ll shortly get to.
“Despite inadequate federal abortion reporting statistics, there are official recorded instances of infants being born-alive after attempted abortions. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), between 2003 and 2014, there were at least 143 babies born alive after a failed abortion procedure across the United States. The CDC also notes that this number is likely underestimated because of unclear terminology and a lack of understanding about spontaneous abortions,” the Heritage Foundation’s report added.
“In addition to the CDC’s findings, several states report that babies are born alive after botched abortions. In 2017, Florida reported that 11 infants were born alive following an abortion, and six were born alive in 2018. Arizona reported that 10 fetuses or embryos were born alive after an abortion in 2017 and Minnesota reported that three babies were born alive following an abortion in 2017.”
And, it’s not exactly as if states are doing their best to prevent this from happening either, as the Heritage Foundation noted.
“While roughly half of states currently provide some protection for these babies under state law, many do not — particularly states with very permissive abortion laws and a high incidence of abortion, such as California and New York. While these state laws are important, it is also vital that Congress take action to ensure the protection of these babies born alive in failed abortions, as well.”
As the Heritage Foundation called out in a separate report, similar data from government sources in countries around the world “confirm that late-term abortion procedures on babies who have reached the stage of viability sometimes result in live births.” Considering that Harris has indicated her willingness to allow even late-term abortions on a federal level, abrogating any individual state bans on the procedure, this makes passage of the Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act even more critical.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities noted in their own fact-sheet that there’s ample evidence of grisly individual cases that should have raised the attention of authorities.
“In 2017, while answering a question about whether there were standard procedures for verifying if the baby was alive when it came out of the uterus, Dr. DeShawn Taylor, an abortion provider in Arizona and California, did not answer the question directly and told an undercover reporter that she paid attention to who was in the room. The implication seems clear that it is OK to ensure the baby does not survive as long as there are no observers who would be troubled by that,” the USCCB’s fact sheet on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act noted.
“As an example of when observers do find it troubling, three former employees of an abortion clinic testified in 2013 that the doctor they worked under in Denton, Texas actively killed babies born alive during an abortion … In 2006, a 23-week-old baby boy was born alive at A Gyn Diagnostic Center in Hialeah, Florida. When he began breathing and moving, abortion clinic owner Belkis Gonzalez reportedly cut the umbilical cord and zipped him into a biohazard bag, still alive, after which he died.”
These sorts of deaths involving born-alive babies who were then denied care have been recorded. For example, a 2019 Minnesota Department of Health report documented three such cases in 2018 in the state of Minnesota alone. In all three cases, infants who survived abortions were denied life-saving treatment and were left to die.
In the 114th through 118th (and current) Congresses, the bill has been introduced to, quite simply, make denying medical care to babies born alive during an abortion procedure a crime. Depending on who has control of the House of Representatives, it has either died in the House (if the Democrats are in control) or in the Senate (where it cannot clear the filibuster and invariably withers in the Senate Judiciary Committee).
In the 118th Congress, it passed by a vote of 220-210-1 on Jan. 11, 2023, just days after Republicans took back control of the House. Guess where it’s been since Feb. 1, 2023? “Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary,” as per Congress’ legislation-tracking website.
If this omission of care, which would amount to the killing of a newborn via neglect at the very least, is so illegal or unfathomable that a presidential candidate needed to be fact-checked during a debate by the moderators, why not pass the bill? It would eliminate situations like the one Ralph Northam theoretically proposed and then vehemently denied could happen.
“While state laws prohibit homicide, they often do not clarify with any specifics what a doctor is expected to do should a baby inadvertently be born alive following an attempted abortion,” the USCCB noted.
“The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act does. It makes his/her obligation clear – to treat this newborn infant with the same medical attention and care as other babies born at the same age and then transfer the baby to a hospital for further evaluation and care by a qualified specialist.”
Thus, the takeaway is that the Democrats don’t want this obligation, which should be a no-brainer when it comes to codification. Born-alive abortions do exist, as Donald Trump said during a debate — and for a party that wants to federally codify Roe v. Wade, it’s curious how, if these children aren’t left to die, the Democrats are standing in the way of commonsense legislation that affords these babies the protections evidence suggests they so desperately need.
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