The U.S. Senate is preparing to vote on two pro-life bills focused on banning late-term abortions and protecting babies born alive following failed abortions, both of which are more common than the Left claims. Though the votes are expected to fail, they will force the Democrats to go on record as the party of infanticide and late-term abortions.
The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act would require doctors to provide medical care for infants who survive attempted abortions, and the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act would prohibit abortion after 20 weeks’ gestation based on scientific research that suggests a fetus can feel the pain of an abortion at this time. Other studies have claimed the unborn can feel pain significantly earlier than 20 weeks.
Life News reports Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell filed for a procedural motion this week that would set up votes on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act after the Senate’s Presidents’ Day recess.
The bills would require a 60-vote threshold to end debate and allow Senate votes to take place, an unlikely scenario as Republicans control just 53 of the seats. Instead, the votes will serve to highlight the radicalism of the Democrats, particularly of the two Democratic presidential candidates — Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) — Life News observes, as they will force the Democrats to go on record on the issues.
Polls show that regardless of where Americans stand on abortion, the vast majority of voters support such common-sense measures. Yet the Democratic Party has emerged as the party of infanticide and late-term abortion in recent years.
“These compassionate, common-ground bills would have become law long ago, were it not for extremist Democrats beholden to the radical abortion lobby,” Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement to Breitbart News.
“Hillary Clinton’s support for abortion up to the moment of birth is a significant reason why Donald Trump is in the Oval Office,” she asserted. “Yet, so far, the 2020 Democratic field has taken abortion extremism to a new level, supporting not only late-term abortion, but even infanticide, and demanding that all abortions are paid for by taxpayers.”
Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) called out the Democrats’ “abortion extremism” on the Senate floor on Thursday.
“Unfortunately abortion extremism has grown to such an extent in the Democrat Party that leading Democrats — including a Democrat presidential candidate — have not only ruled out banning late-term abortions, they’ve actually refused to rule out infanticide,” he said.
The Left claims the bills are unnecessary, but statistics and personal testimonies show otherwise.
Family Research Council staffer Patricia Mosley told senators during a recent hearing called “The Infant Patient: Ensuring Appropriate Medical Care for Children Born Alive” that existing law is failing to protect babies born alive during botched abortions.
“There have been no cases involving prosecutions under the [2002] Born-Alive Infants Protection Act that we know of. Why? Because there is currently no federal criminal statute specifically prohibiting taking the lives of born-alive infants,” she said.
During recent congressional testimony in the House on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, registered nurse Jill Stanek testified that she has personally witnessed infants born alive during failed abortions, and that the protocol was to leave them in a “soiled utility room,” and later a “comfort room,” until they perished.
And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already reported that between 2003 and 2014, 143 babies were born after attempted abortions and lived anywhere from minutes to one or two more days, but admits that figure could be drastically higher, given that the information was derived from requested voluntary information from states. The CDC report states, “It is possible that this number (143) underestimates the total number of deaths involving induced termination.”
As noted during testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice on the Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act in 2016 during the Obama administration by the Family Research Council’s Arina Grossu, the CDC’s numbers are absolutely underestimates because “[Kermit] Gosnell is only one abortionist who was responsible for ‘hundreds of snippings’ of born-alive babies, yet he did not report even one.” She adds, “His numbers alone exceed the ‘definitive’ numbers of the CDC.”
The American Center for Law and Justice believes the number could be as high as 362 babies born alive between 2001 and 2010.
More recently, data from just Minnesota, Florida, and Arizona reveals at least 40 babies were born alive during failed abortions between 2016 and 2018.
Sadly, these are not new developments. A spokesman at Christ Hospital’s parent, Advocate Health Care, told the Chicago Sun Times as far back as 2001 that an estimated 10 to 20 percent of “fetuses” with genetic defects who were “aborted” indeed survived outside the womb for short periods of time. In the same year, “live birth” was listed as a “complication” of abortions by a perinatal symposium co-sponsored by the Waukesha Memorial Hospital OB/GYN Department and the Medical College of Wisconsin OB/GYN Department.
As most states do not require such data to be maintained, pro-life advocates are left to wonder just how many more live births after failed abortions are left undocumented.
The Left also claims abortions after 24 weeks are rare, but CDC estimates that approximately 13,000 late-term abortions are performed in the United States every year.
Ron Fitzsimmons, the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted in 1997 that he intentionally lied in earlier statements by claiming late-term abortions are rare and reserved to save the lives of mothers or in instances of fetal abnormalities.
A 2013 study by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute concluded that the majority of late-term abortions were elective:
Most women seeking later abortion fit at least one of five profiles: They were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding and then had access problems, or were young and nulliparous.
Last February, the liberal New York magazine even highlighted an Oregon woman who admitted she terminated her healthy pregnancy at 28 weeks because she was not ready to be a parent in a sympathetic piece on women who have had abortions.
According to Life Site News, the United States is just one of seven countries that allows abortions through the ninth month of pregnancy.
Raven Clabough acquired her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at the University of Albany in upstate New York. She currently lives in Pennsylvania and has been a writer for The New American since 2010.
