Who will speak for those who have no voice? President Trump’s recent executive order regarding babies born alive answers that question: We will, as fellow Americans. Even as some hospitals question whether babies born “too young” or “too disabled” are worth trying to save, the president’s executive order reminds all of us that they, and we, have both a legal and moral obligation to try.
I can sympathize with the anguish that parents of newborn children feel as their sons and daughters struggle to survive in the first moments after birth. During my second pregnancy, blood work suggested that the daughter I carried would suffer from cystic fibrosis.
When the medical staff in the delivery room told me my daughter had a perforated intestine, a common symptom among children born with cystic fibrosis, it only confirmed what we had already suspected. Our brave young daughter faced not only lifelong complications from an illness that shortens many cystic fibrosis patients’ lives but an immediate battle with a series of complicated surgeries to repair and strengthen her intestines.
Through a combination of divine grace, a caring medical staff, and her own strong determination, our daughter came through. Every day, my husband and I thank God for her presence in our lives — the joy she brings to us, her elder sister, and those around her — and for the doctors and nurses who cared for her.
Parents in situations like ours will benefit from the enhanced enforcement promised under the president’s executive order. Federal law already prohibits all facilities receiving federal financial assistance from discriminating against individuals with disabilities. In theory, this provision should prevent hospitals that accept Medicare, Medicaid, or other government health programs from refusing to treat newborn infants on the grounds that those infants are born with disabilities or born before a medical consensus considers the infant viable outside the mother’s womb.
But despite those legal protections, some hospitals still refuse to treat premature babies, telling anguished parents that “there’s nothing we can do.” Not only does that position violate science (continuing medical advances suggest babies can survive sooner than the 24-week time frame traditionally considered the point of viability), it violates federal law too.
The Trump administration’s executive order reminds hospitals of the obligations, both legal and moral, that they have to treat all patients, including infants born extremely premature. On the one hand, it represents a sad commentary on our society that the federal government needs to remind hospitals they have an obligation to save the lives of the most vulnerable. But on the other, I know this executive order will give new parents facing heartbreaking situations the certainty to know that they will not also have to fight the hospitals themselves in their child’s hour of need.
At a time when some lawmakers are talking about aborting babies up until the moment of birth, the Trump administration’s strong executive order will help protect the youngest and weakest among us. It should help to restore a culture that values and protects life, from conception to natural death.
Mary Vought (@MaryVought) is the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund.
