Voices for Life Is a blog dedicated to informing and educating the public on pro-life and pro-family issues.
Our focus is to protect the sanctity of all human life from conception until natural death. This includes protecting babies from abortion, fetal tissue experimentation, and embryonic research; and the general population from euthanasia, cloning, population control and human genetic engineering.
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed H.R. 4712, also known as the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, by a vote of 241-183. 235 Republicans voted in favor of the bill, along with six Democrats (Cartwright, Cuellar, Langevin, Lipinski, Peterson, and Walz). According to Congress.gov, this bill had 131 co-sponsors and “amends the federal criminal code to require any health care practitioner who is present when a child is born alive following an abortion or attempted abortion to: (1) exercise the same degree of care as reasonably provided to any other child born alive at the same gestational age, and (2) ensure that such child is immediately admitted to a hospital.”
Detractors also claimed that H.R. 4712 is a back-door attempt to somehow restrict ‘abortion rights.’ However, the text of the resolution does not restrict abortion. It reads:
The term “born alive” means the complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother, 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.
Also, a health care practitioner or other employee who has knowledge of a failure to comply with these requirements must immediately report such failure to an appropriate law enforcement agency.
An individual who violates the provisions of this bill is subject to a criminal fine, up to five years in prison, or both.
An individual who commits an overt act that kills a child born alive is subject to criminal prosecution for murder.
The bill bars the criminal prosecution of a mother of a child born alive for conspiracy to violate these provisions, for being an accessory after the fact, or for concealment of felony.
A woman who undergoes an abortion or attempted abortion may file a civil action for damages against an individual who violates this bill.
Live Action’s 2013 InHuman investigation revealed that the abortion industry does not help abortion survivors, despite the Born Alive Infants Protection Act having been in place for over a decade. In the following video, Washington, D.C. abortionist Cesare Santangelo tells an undercover investigator that if her baby was accidentally born alive, he would not offer assistance to the child to help him or her survive:
Clearly, a law that has few ‘teeth’ is an ineffective law, and the abortion industry’s friends in Congress and the media consistently shield the industry from accountability. The Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act should now advance to the Senate for a vote.
On Tuesday House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca.) announced the first great national pro-life news of 2018. “Next week—the week of the annual March for Life when tens of thousands of Americans come to Washington to give voice to the voiceless unborn—the House will vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Act,” he said in a statement. The chief House sponsor of H.R. 4712 is Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tn.)
Majority Leader McCarthy explained the commonsense humanity behind H.R. 4712.
“This bill states simply that if a baby is born after a failed abortion attempt, he or she should be given the same medical care as a baby born any other way. In line with our longstanding commitment to empower women, mothers will never be held criminally accountable. However, doctors who fail to provide medical care to newborns will be held criminally accountable. There is absolutely no ambiguity here. This is about protecting babies who are born and alive, and nobody should be against that.”
National Right to Life congratulated McCarthy for his leadership on H.R. 4712.
“We are grateful to Leader McCarthy for scheduling a vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act next week when a massive number of pro-lifers will come to DC for the March for Life,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life.
“NRLC believes that it is time for Congress to act decisively to put the entire abortion industry on notice that when they treat a born-alive human person as medical waste, as a source for organ harvesting, or as a creature who may be subjected to lethal violence with impunity, they will do so at grave legal peril.”
The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Act would strengthen enforcement of existing law, such as the 2002 Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.
In 2002, Congress approved, without a dissenting vote, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA), subsequently signed into law by President George W. Bush and codified as 1 U.S.C. §8. This important law states that “every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development” is a “person” for all federal law purposes.
The 2002 BAIPA was a response to troubling indications, well summarized in the House Judiciary Committee’s excellent 2001 report on the legislation, that some abortion providers and pro-abortion activists did not regard infants born alive during abortion procedures as legal persons – especially if the infants were deemed to be “pre-viable” (i.e., have limited life expectancy due to prematurity).
Such a mindset puts a substantial number of live-born infant persons in jeopardy of gross neglect or overt violence. Live birth, as defined in 1 U.S.C. §8, may occur a month before “viability.” BAIPA made it crystal clear that life expectancy is entirely irrelevant for purposes of legal personhood.
Since that time, there have been many additional troubling reports.
Lauretta Brown, writing at Townhall, observed that in their final report in January 2017, The House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives found that abortionists could be using techniques that resulted in infants being born alive.
The Panel wrote, Brown reported, that according to documents obtained in their investigation, many researchers want tissue from late-gestation infants “untainted by feticidal agents.”
