When Spencer covered news earlier this month that the Maryland legislature was considering the Pregnant Person’s Freedom Act of 2022, it was tempting to think it was too evil to be true. It's not just another abortion expansion bill, but rather it allows for infanticide in that those responsible are off the hook when a child born alive from abortion is left to die or is actively killed, even weeks later due to neglect. Fortunately Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) is too pro-life to approve of this atrocity, with the "perinatal" language having been removed from the Senate bill. California, however, is another story.
Writing for National Review Online on Friday, Wesley J. Smith warned of how this is becoming a pattern. "Now, a California Bill to Permit Infant Death by Neglect," his title read, with original emphasis.
Smith directly cites the text from the bill, AB 2223, to highlight his concerns. Emphasis is Smith's:
(c) A critical part of realizing reproductive justice for people in California is clarifying that there shall be no civil and criminal penalties for people’s actual, potential, or alleged pregnancy outcomes.
...
The Legislature finds and declares that every individual possesses a fundamental right of privacy with respect to personal reproductive decisions, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.
...
123467. (a) Notwithstanding any other law, a person shall not be subject to civil or criminal liability or penalty, or otherwise deprived of their rights, based on their actions or omissions with respect to their pregnancy or actual, potential, or alleged pregnancy outcome, including miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, or perinatal death.
As one can see, it's no accident that "postpartum" and "perinatal" are referenced.
In closing his piece Smith wrote, with original emphasis, "One blue-state bill that would allow a born baby to be neglected to death might be an anomaly. A second that does that — and perhaps could be interpreted to allow infanticide, also — is a pattern. The cultural Left is blazing new grounds of depravity."
While the Maryland language allowed for four weeks, California's bill goes to six weeks.
As Madeline covered earlier this week, the particularly pro-abortion Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) also signed legislation on Tuesday to make abortion cheaper for patients who have private insurance plans.
All of this is a purposeful move to boost California's "abortion infrastructure" and heavily promote the procedure where its abortion laws are already some of the most relaxed in the world. According to the Americans United for Life (AUL) Life List for 2022, California, the most populous state, is ranked the 42nd most pro-life state.
California does not report its abortion statistics to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The Guttmacher Institute indicated in January of this year that there were 132,680 abortions in California for 2017 of the 862,320 in the United States overall that year.
We can almost certainly expect such a law to pass, as well as multiple other pro-abortion laws in California, with Madeline citing a FOX 11 report that mentioned there are over a dozen proposals "aimed at expanding and protecting access to abortion in the nation’s most populous state."
With the U.S. Supreme Court about to potentially overturn Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson, a case that examines the constitutionality of previability abortion bans, pro-life and pro-abortion states have been acting accordingly to expand or limit abortion.
The pro-abortion Democratic Party has proved to be in favor of infanticide before. In a 2019 column for Townhall, I covered how the U.S. Senate failed to pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, offered by Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), as it not only failed to pass by unanimous consent, but also failed to overcome the filibuster. It similarly failed in 2020.
To this day, the bill has not been able to receive a vote in the Democratically-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, though Republicans have been trying for years through the discharge petition process.
Democratic governors have also vetoed such bills that have come across their desks.