Two giants who once strode brazenly across America’s killing fields made news this month. Former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards died, and Boulder, Colorado’s notorious late-term feticidal “absolutist” Warren Hern retired. Hern, who was good friends with fellow killer George Tiller, has infamously said that “the only difference between the American antiabortion movement and the Taliban is about 8,000 miles.”
Tragically, the human slaughter sentiments of Richards, Hern, and Tiller live on. Outside of the abattoirs where tiny humans are destroyed daily, nowhere does the gruesome anti-human sentiment live more loudly than in the halls of Congress.
Last week, two bills were sponsored by Republicans to require infants born alive following an abortion to be medically treated just “as any other child born alive at the same gestational age” would be. The bills included enforcement mechanisms as well.
The House bill passed along party lines with the exception of Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar who crossed over to the just and merciful side—that is, to the right side of history—to vote “yea.”
One day earlier, not even one Democrat voted for Oklahoma Senator James Lankford’s similar bill, therefore it failed to win enough votes to overcome a filibuster. Not one Democrat has the compassion or will to require physicians to provide life-saving medical treatment to a suffering infant—not fetus—infant.
The ghoulish Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who can always be counted on to spout excrement, argued,
This bill is the very definition of pernicious: it attacks women’s health care using false narratives and outright fear-mongering, and adds more legal risk for doctors on something that is already illegal.
What a repugnant irony to describe a bill requiring a newly born infant to be treated medically as “pernicious.” Woe to those who call good evil.
Schumer is correct that the bill adds more legal risk for some doctors. It adds legal risk to those abortionists who flout existing law because they know that the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002 lacks federal enforcement mechanisms. In his statement, Schumer inadvertently admitted that abortionists are ignoring the 2002 law. The omission of enforcement mechanisms is precisely why the two current bills are necessary.
The Charlotte Lozier institute clarifies what Schumer seeks to obscure:
At the federal level, the Born Alive Infants Protection Act provides that all babies who are born alive are considered human persons under the law, including babies who survive abortions. However, the law contains no requirements that abortion survivors be provided with appropriate care or transferred to a hospital, and there is no enforcement mechanism if the law is violated. A strong federal law is necessary to ensure that all infants who survive abortions are protected, not just those born in certain states.
Schumer continued:
So much of the hard-right’s anti-choice agenda is pushed, frankly, by people who have little to no understanding of what women go through when they are pregnant.
Yes, Schumer is just that ignorant—or deceitful. He believes that the 7,000-member American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the staff and scholars who work for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, and the 3000 chapters of National Right to Life “have little to no understanding of what women go through when they are pregnant.”
It might serve Schumer to get out of the swampy Washington bubble every once and again or add a little diversity to his reading.
Empathetic Schumer frets about the fate of abortionists and the feelings of women at the moment they realize their efforts to kill their offspring have failed. He cares not at all about suffering babies:
The scenario targeted by this bill is one of the most heartbreaking moments that a woman could ever encounter, the agonizing choice of having to end care when serious and rare complications arise in pregnancy.
The bill he opposes does not address ending care. It addresses starting care.
Moreover, not all late-term abortions are performed because of “serious and rare” pregnancy complications. The Charlotte Lozier Institute reports that “Recent research on women seeking abortions in the third trimester shows that many women undergoing late-term abortions are doing so for the same reasons as women who get abortions earlier in pregnancy.”
That said, even babies who survive late-term abortions performed ostensibly because of “serious and rare pregnancy complications” have a human right to the same kind of medical treatment any other newborn would be provided.
In a Ms. Magazine paean to the odious work of Hern, Carole Joffe, “professor at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) and a professor of sociology emerita at the University of California, Davis” wrote, “only about 1.5 percent of abortions in the U.S. take place after 20 weeks gestation.”
That teeny tiny-seeming percentage masks an inconvenient number. In the first half of 2024, there were approximately 99,000 abortions per month in the U.S. So, over the course of the year, approximately 15,444 humans were killed after 20 weeks gestation. In other words, to moral ciphers like Schumer, Joffe, or Hern, if only 15,000 unwanted or imperfect humans are unjustly slaughtered, no biggie.
Leftists relentlessly focus on the small percentage of abortions committed against babies at later stages of development and the even fewer numbers of babies who survive such barbarous procedures. So, how many babies survive efforts to kill them? The truth is no one knows. What we do know is the number is not zero. Leaving a baby to die is a hidden act.
But a research study includes this troubling statistic: “Most clinicians (69%) who report performing D&Es at 18 weeks, last menstrual period, or greater do not routinely induce fetal demise preoperatively.”
The Charlotte Lozier Institute provides another hint at the hard-to-ascertain data on abortion survival:
Research published in 2024 in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology analyzed 13,777 late-term abortions between 15-29 weeks performed in Canada and found that over 11% resulted in live births. … Forty-eight percent of the abortions were performed in cases in which there was no risk to either the unborn baby’s or mother’s health.
An argument on the morality of denying medical care to newborns based on the number of babies who suffer this fate is a sign of the moral paucity of the leftist position. What other relatively small group of weak, helpless humans will Democrats argue should be denied medical treatment?
“‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me’” (Matthew 25:40).