As Majority Leader Mitch McConnell brings two abortion votes to the Senate floor on Tuesday, the liberal media and Democratic lawmakers are scrambling to find ways to categorize 20-week-old unborn children and abortion surviving infants as less than human.
The senate will vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors act, the latter of which would guarantee urgent medical care for an infant who survived an abortion. The first bill, commonly referred to as “Micah’s Bill” for a young boy born at just 22 weeks, asserts that unborn children at the gestational age of 20 weeks and later feel pain and fear and bans nearly all abortions after that cutoff.
The second bill, which specifically addresses the rare case of a child surviving an abortion attempt, would legally require the attending physician to perform lifesaving care on the infant after birth and transport them as quickly as possible to emergency medical facilities. Detractors of both bills argue that the bills are “anti-choice” and are an attack on women’s reproductive rights.
Critics of Micah’s Bill reject the notion that 20 week and older unborn babies feel pain, despite the increasing number of surviving premature births near that cutoff. President Trump introduced Ellie, born at 21 weeks, and her mother Robin at the State of the Union Address last month with a call for Congress to end late-term abortion.
New York Senator and failed presidential candidate Kirstin Gillibrand decried both bills as a “full-out assault on women,” and pointed to the timing, just one day before the massive gathering of pro-life and Trump supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference in DC, as a “political ploy.”
.@SenGillibrand on the Senate taking up the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act: An “all-out assault on women”
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 25, 2020
"They’re trying to harm women. They’re trying to take away their civil rights, human rights … They’re taking away their religious freedom" pic.twitter.com/2Ne6rGzpR3
Detractors of the Born-Alive bill say that it is unnecessary because it repeats already existing laws and puts abortion doctors at greater risks of persecution for performing abortions. Despite this arguement, however, no law currently exists that requires physicians to perform lifesaving care on abortion surviving children. Concern for the safety of children born via a botched abortion attempt increased dramatically after Democratic Virginia Governor Ralph Northam made alarming public comments about what would be done for an infant in the case of abortion survival in 2019.
CNN characterized the Born-Alive bill as a mandate that would “require abortion providers to work to ‘preserve the life and health’ of a fetus that was born following an attempted abortion as they would for a newborn baby,” a statement that seems to acknowledges their belief that unborn children are less than human.
Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren also derided the bills’ intentions and asserted that, should they pass, it would be a direct undermining of women’s rights. “Let me be clear: today’s abortion vote in the Senate is part of a deliberate, methodical, orchestrated right-wing assault on reproductive rights, & I am sick & tired of it,” she said. “The American people are sick & tired of it.”
Let me be clear: today’s abortion vote in the Senate is part of a deliberate, methodical, orchestrated right-wing assault on reproductive rights, & I am sick & tired of it. The American people are sick & tired of it.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) February 25, 2020
But the truth is that most Americans, even among the most ardent defenders of abortion, do not support abortion at any gestational age. Pro-life Democrats, who exist by the tens of millions in the US, have been left out in the cold by the field of 2020 presidential candidates who have all embraced nearly limitless access to abortion.
Meanwhile, pro-life conservatives have been enamored with President Trump, who became the first president to ever speak at the National March for Life at the beginning of the year. Unlike the past few Republican presidential administrations, Trump has spoken openly and consistently against abortion.