With the exception of Sens. Joe Manchin and Bob Casey Jr., Senate Democrats just endorsed infanticide. OK, perhaps that’s a tad overstated. The more charitable view is that they just aren’t opposed to killing some babies.
Why would 48 senators refuse to oppose infanticide? Is the proposal a surreptitious attempt to impose “The Handmaid’s Tale”—that tired feminist cliché about women forced to carry babies they don’t want—on an unsuspecting public? Hardly. The bill wouldn’t force any woman to do anything with her body. Indeed, it wouldn’t prevent a single abortion.
Rather, the bill would require health care practitioners present when a baby survives abortion to exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as they would “render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.” It would also require abortionists to ensure that surviving babies be “transported immediately to a hospital for care,” and would outlaw “an overt act” meant to kill “a child born alive,” i.e., it would outlaw infanticide.
Ooh, how radical! Here comes the patriarchy!
This is a very big deal. Infanticide has long been considered one of humanity’s great evils. We properly disdain the ancient Roman and Greek practice of exposing unwanted infants to the elements. German doctors who euthanized disabled babies during World War II were rightly branded as monsters. A few were hanged for their murders after the Nuremberg Doctors trials.
But who are we to get on our high horse? Roe v. Wade and the bioethics movement have pushed our society in the same direction by denigrating the moral importance of gestating human life and diminishing the worth of the unborn as killable and disposable as mere medical waste—including babies who are viable.
That’s not fair, Wesley! Roe v. Wade ruled that state laws could set limits on third-trimester abortions. Indeed—but it certainly did nothing to outlaw late-term abortions nor require states to enact such laws. Recently, some blue states passed laws allowing no gestational time constraints on abortion, statutes that don’t violate one i-dot or t-cross of Roe v. Wade.
And what are we to make of this provision? “A fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus shall not have independent rights under Vermont law.” This utter objectification of unborn life would fully authorize the horrible fetal-part selling practices in which Planned Parenthood was caught engaging.
We also mustn’t forget that in 2019, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam—a pediatric neurologist!—opined that a baby who survived an abortion could be neglected to death, stating in a radio 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, once again, infanticide and unwanted baby neglect have become respectable—at least on the left flank of politics and among leading members of the medical intelligentsia. In accepting baby-killing by refusing to outlaw it, Senate Democrats besmirched the foundational moral principle of the West that all—including babies—are endowed with the equal right to life; not because they are healthy, not because they are wanted, but simply and merely because they are human.