Even in arguing against abortion regulations,
Democrats
can’t help but endorse them.
The House voted on Wednesday to pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a bill that requires infants born alive after botched abortions to receive the same amount of medical attention and care as any other child born prematurely. Unsurprisingly, almost every single Democrat in the chamber voted against the bill. Only one Democrat voted for the bill: Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX). One other Democrat opted to vote “present”: Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX).
GOP HOUSE PASSES TWO ANTI-ABORTION BILLS
As my colleague Quin Hillyer
wrote
on Wednesday, Democrats’ refusal to support a bill that effectively shores up protections against infanticide is outrageous. So were their excuses for voting against it. It was obvious Democrats were grasping for whatever justification they could find because many of their lame attempts at obfuscation ended up serving as arguments for the bill.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), for example, argued at one point that the problem with the bill is that it “requires immediately taking a struggling baby to a hospital. That hospital could be hours away and could be detrimental to the life of that baby.” Putting aside the fact that hospitals are the best possible place for a medically struggling infant, it is remarkable that Schakowsky doesn’t recognize that she just made the argument for shutting down abortion clinics altogether. In fact,
pro-lifers
have been pushing for years to require all abortive procedures to be performed in hospitals, or at least by doctors with admitting privileges, due to concerns that the abortion doctors and the clinics themselves are not equipped to save the life of the mother or the child if an emergency arises.
Schakowsky wasn’t the only Democrat who made this mistake. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) made a similar argument, saying, “The problem with this bill is that it endangers some infants by stating that that infant must immediately be brought to the hospital.” Again, I fail to see how a bill that mandates immediate, life-saving care for born-alive infants puts them at any more risk. A hospital is surely a much safer place for them than an abortion clinic, considering the former exists to heal people and the latter exists to make sure they’re never born. But if Nadler is so worried about the distance between abortion clinics and hospitals and how it might affect the mother and child’s safety, then surely he would agree with pro-lifers that abortion clinics are endangering lives by failing to guarantee certain safety standards, such as making sure the abortionist has admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and that the clinic complies with codes that apply to other ambulatory surgery centers.
The worst excuse by far, however, came from Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI), who thought she could justify her opposition to the bill by endorsing the innate personhood and value of every unborn child.
“When I read Scripture, I turn to Jeremiah 1:5, which states, ‘I knew you before I formed you and placed you in your mother’s womb.’ It doesn’t say the government’s womb,” Scholten claimed. “I believe life is precious, but I reject the idea that if I embrace the sanctity of life, I also must be forced to invite the federal government in to regulate it.”
This is, to put it bluntly, insane. For starters, of course the government regulates in order to protect human life. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a government at all. What would the point be of a government that refused to outlaw or punish murder, or require that every person regardless of class, status, or ethnicity have access to emergency care? Protecting human life is the government’s most basic function, and the only argument against allowing it to protect unborn life as well is that unborn children aren’t really alive or human. But Scholten just admitted they are, which raises the obvious question: Why are their lives not worthy of the same protections afforded to the rest of us?
For a party that works so hard to squash
abortion
restrictions, even those as uncontroversial as the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, Democrats can’t help but lend their support to the pro-life case. That’s the power of an argument so simple and morally convincing as the pro-life argument — it finds a way to advance itself, even out of the mouths of those who hate it.
