4 Things The “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” Debate Reveals

America is well outside the norm on abortion. Many people assume that Western Europe has equally-extreme abortion laws, but they don’t: they actually have a great deal more restriction, particularly later in pregnancy. But it’s in the interest of pro-choice activists that Americans don’t know this. When the Susan B. Anthony List pointed out that “the United States is currently out of the mainstream in the family of nations, in which only 7 out of 198 nations allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy,” the Washington Post didn’t believe them until their own research confirmed it (“This one seemed a bit surprising, so we looked into it. And it turned out, it’s backed by data”).

It makes sense that pro-abortion groups wouldn’t advertise this fact. After all, only 13% of Americans actually want abortion laws this lax. So to ensure that we stay this radical on abortion, pro-choice groups sound the panic alarm any time any restriction, no matter how common-sense, is proposed. This time, the controversy is over a bill proposed by Senator Ben Sasse, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. As the name suggests, it’s not even about children in the womb. It’s about ensuring that children who are born after botched abortions can’t be murdered (or intentionally allowed to die) right there on the operating table.

In a sane world, this is the easiest bill to support in the world. Pro-lifers are regularly denigrated as “anti-choice,” but rarely do we seriously accuse our opponents of being “anti-life.” We typically assume the best, that they’re just misinformed about the science showing that the unborn child is alive. But here, this is just a law protecting children that literally everyone knows are alive, because they’re breathing and crying (or trying to) on the operating table. This is a great chance for pro-choicers to say, “Look, we’re pro-life, too, we just don’t think the fetus is a human being!” And the House version of the bill easily passed, 241-183 (even though only 6 of 193 Democratic members of the House supported it), but the bill has been stalled in the Senate.

(1) The Media Isn’t Even Trying.

It seems that everyone likes to complain about media bias towards their respective political position, but in the case of abortion coverage, there’s a long and well-documented history of an extreme tilt against the pro-life movement. When reporter David Shaw died in 2005, his newspaper, the LA Times, recalled how he “forged new standards for media criticism.” He did this in several areas: for example, showing how despite their pro-diversity coverage, the Times had a terrible track record on hiring racial minorities, or showing how the paper had “violated a primary tenet of journalism: that papers should not enter into business deals with those they cover.” But he’s perhaps most famous for a 1990 article entitled “Abortion Bias Seeps Into News.” He begins with a telling story:

When reporter Susan Okie wrote on Page 1 of the Washington Post last year that advances in the treatment of premature babies could undermine support for the abortion-rights movement, she quickly heard from someone in the movement.

“Her message was clear,” Okie recalled recently. “I felt that they were . . . (saying) ‘You’re hurting the cause’ . . . that I was . . . being herded back into line.”

Okie says she was “shocked” by the “disquieting” assumption implicit in the complaint–that reporters, especially women reporters, are expected to write only stories that support abortion rights.

It’s a striking story: the pro-choice movement assumed that, as a female reporter, Okie would be both pro-choice and willing to lay aside any commitment to neutrality in order to promote the movement. But as Shaw noted, they had good reason to assume:

But it’s not surprising that some abortion-rights activists would see journalists as their natural allies. Most major newspapers support abortion rights on their editorial pages, and two major media studies have shown that 80% to 90% of U.S. journalists personally favor abortion rights. Moreover, some reporters participated in a big abortion rights march in Washington last year, and the American Newspaper Guild, the union that represents news and editorial employes at many major papers, has officially endorsed “freedom of choice in abortion decisions.”

Shaw went on to show several constant areas in which reporters’ near-consensus on abortion colored their approach to the news: framing the debate exclusively in terms of women’s rights (rather than talking about the fetus), describing things as a victory or a defeat for the pro-choice movement (rather than considering the impact on the pro-life movement), and describing pro-life measures as “harsh” or “restrictive” (when, as Shaw notes, “abortion opponents regard the legislation as benevolent–toward the fetus.”

Shaw’s article is nearly 30 years old, and its only shortcoming is a sort of naïvity about the trends in journalism. That is, Shaw clearly recognized and carefully documented the problem, but seemed to think it was improving. On the contrary, it’s gotten dramatically worse. Take for example, a recent piece by Denise Grady, science reporter for the New York Times, called “‘Executing Babies’: Here Are the Facts Behind Trump’s Misleading Abortion Tweet.” Even from the headline, it reads more like an opinion piece than a news article, but the piece is remarkable for its total dearth of facts. The subhead says, “infants are rarely born alive after abortion procedures, and if they are, doctors do not kill them.”

How does Grady “know” how frequently abortionists end up delivering a still-living child, or what they do afterwards? She’s apparently just taking their word of it. Literally the only people Grady quotes in the piece are abortionists. There’s no attempt to get another side, or even (apparently) to fact-check their claims. The New York Times might as well have just cut out the middlewoman and let the abortionists write the articles themselves. And the “facts” cited aren’t true. The question of rarity is subjective. How frequently do we need infanticide to happen for it to be worth legislating against? Michael Wear, who previously led faith outreach for President Obama’s 2012 election campaign and worked in his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, points out in The Atlantic that they’re not that rare:

Abortions do sometimes fail. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that from 2003-2014, at least 143 infant deaths involved “induced termination.” Only 97 of these infant deaths could be determined to have “involved a maternal complication or congenital anomalies.”

Were you aware that abortions fail that frequently, resulting in born children who have to be cared for, or neglected, or killed? Because while it’s obviously not a majority of even late-term abortions, that number struck me as alarmingly high, not as so obviously rare that it’s false to claim otherwise.

As for Grady’s claim that abortionists never kill infants born alive, that’s demonstrably false. Her readers would know that if the New York Times cared about the Kermit Gosnell case, in which an abortionist was convicted of multiple counts of first-degree murder precisely because he was executing infants after birth (as well as before). The Times showed no interest in following the grisly details of that trial until after 4 weeks of ignoring it. And now they claim with a straight face (in the news section!), that these crimes don’t occur… simply because a couple of abortionists say that they don’t.

(2) It Really Is About Infanticide.

The most horrific contribution to the born-alive debate comes from Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (already having a heck of a month after his admission, and subsequent denial, of having worn racist “blackface” in his medical school yearbook, and his voluntary admission that he had worn blackface on at least one other occasion). Northam, a pediatrician, considered the third trimester abortion and “born alive” cases no big deal, explaining in an interview:

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. 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. So I think this was really blown out of proportion.

In no uncertain terms, Northam is talking about an unwanted baby who has already been delivered. There’s no pretense that the baby isn’t alive because we can’t see him. And his argument is that this is something that the government shouldn’t be involved in. It’s part of his broader point that “this is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved.”

In plain language, he’s saying that there are babies who are born who need medical assistance to live (newborn babies are not famously great at taking care of themselves) and he thinks it’s no big deal for doctors to decide whether or not the baby should be allowed to live based on whether or not “that’s what the mother and the family desired.” Medically and ethically, it’s horrific to think that anyone (adult, child, infant, or preborn) should have these life-or-death questions determined not by what’s medically possible, but by how much their family loves or wants them.

What the Governor of Virginia is advocating as no big deal is infanticide (William Langer’s “Infanticide: A Historical Survey” defines the crime as “the wilful destruction of newborn babes through exposure, starvation, strangulation, smothering, poisoning, or through the use of some lethal weapon”). There’s no meaningful difference between the Governor’s description of how these cases are handled, and letting the family decide whether or not to leave the newborn child outdoors to die.

(3) They’re Not Above Lying.

In the aforementioned New York Times article, Denise Grady claims “The bill would require doctors to use all means available to save the life of a child born alive after an attempted abortion.” This is the same claim made by her abortionist sources (again, why not just let them write the piece?), who warn against doctors being legally forced to engage in “extreme attempts at resuscitation.” But the bill doesn’t say that at all. In fact, when Grady does quote the bill she’s attacking, in the very next sentence, it’s clear that she’s lying:

The bill would require doctors to use all means available to save the life of a child born alive after an attempted abortion. They must, it says, “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child” as they would for “any other child born alive at the same gestational age.”

So notice that the bill doesn’t say extreme and impractical measures always have to be taken, or anything of the sort. There are cases in which a child is dying, and there’s nothing a doctor can do about it. The proposed law would just ensure that these life-or-death decisions are based on legitimate medical reasons, not on whether or not the baby is “wanted.” The pro-choice movement does this repeatedly: they’re trying to scare people into opposing a bill that protects children who have already been born from being killed, and there’s no way to get ordinary people (even ordinary pro-choicers) on board with an agenda that hellish without lying about it.

(4) They Know.

Maybe my description of their motives sounds unfair. To be sure, I think that there are people of good will on both sides of the abortion debate – people who support abortion because they authentically think (for example) that the fetus is just a part of the mother, or a glob of cells, or not yet alive. They believe this because the media has done a great job of shielding them from the truth. But the abortionists who are actually involved aren’t afforded that same ignorance. They know what they’re doing, because it’s their job to stop beating hearts. Here’s how Grady ends her article:

Dr. Conti, a clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University, who also performs abortions, said a patient recently had an abortion at 23 weeks because the fetus had severe abnormalities that were considered incompatible with life.

The woman chose not to have the injection to stop the fetal heartbeat, preferring that her fetus die a natural death. The death occurred during the procedure, before the fetus left the womb, Dr. Conti said. Had it not, she added, comfort care would have been provided.

That is, an abortionist is coldly describing the options for stopping an unborn child’s heart, and is clear that her aim is the death of the fetus. She couldn’t be clearer that her aim is fetal death. Since some people “take the view that life begins at the stage when the foetus could survive outside the womb,” it’s worth pointing out that the fetus can’t die if it’s not alive.

That’s the perverse irony of the debates over both fetal viability and fetal abnormalities: if the unborn child actually weren’t alive, it wouldn’t be coherent to say “he was going to die anyway.” If someone said that they believed rocks were alive, you wouldn’t say, “well, expose them to the sun, and they’ll die pretty quickly,” because that response would suggest you also thought rocks were alive. You wouldn’t talk of ensuring that rocks “die a natural death.”

Just to be clear: without near-constant attention from other people, premature babies (and really, even newborn babies) will die. But saying that implies that they’re not dead yet: that they’re alive, but that their life is fragile. And that’s a reason to oppose killing them, not endorse it.