Senate Republicans, led by U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-OK, introduced the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would prohibit health care practitioners from failing to exercise the proper degree of care for infants who survive abortions or attempted abortions.
“No child should be denied medical care simply because they are ‘unwanted.’ Today, if an abortion procedure fails and a child is born alive, doctors can just ignore the crying baby on the table and watch them slowly die of neglect. That’s not an abortion, that’s infanticide,” Lankford said.
The 7-page bill would require health care providers to preserve the lives of infants who survive abortions with the same care they would give any other child born at the same gestational age. It also would require them to immediately transport the infant to a hospital.
The bill says that “Any infant born alive after an abortion or within a hospital, clinic, or other facility has the same claim to the protection of the law that would arise for any newborn, or for any person who comes to a hospital, clinic, or other facility for screening and treatment or otherwise becomes a patient within its care.”
It would require health care workers to report failures to provide proper care to born-alive infants to the appropriate law enforcement agency. It would create a penalty for those who don’t provide proper care including a fine or imprisonment of up to five years.
Whoever intentionally performs or attempts to perform an overt act that kills a child born alive may also be charged with “attempting to kill a human being,” with the exception of the mother, according to the bill.
The bill also would authorize the mother to take civil action against “any person who committed the violation.” Monetary damages may be pursued for “all injuries, psychological and physical” equal to three times the cost of the abortion or attempted abortion as well as punitive damages.
The bill defines an abortion as “the use or prescription of any instrument, medicine, drug, or any other substance or device to intentionally kill the unborn child of a woman known to be pregnant; or to intentionally terminate the pregnancy of a woman known to be pregnant, with an intention other than – after viability, to produce a live birth and preserve the life and health of the child born alive; or to remove a dead unborn child.”
The bill has multiple Republican cosponsors.
A previous attempt to pass a similar bill failed in the Senate under the first Trump administration.
In 2019, U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-NE, filed the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” which Senate Democrats blocked.
Both Sasse’s and Lankford’s bills are different from a bill President George W Bush signed into law in 2002. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act solely defined being born alive and an infant as a “‘person’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, and ‘individual.’” It provided no penalties or prohibitions related to care for a baby born alive from a failed abortion.
Democrats previously argued Sasse’s bill was unnecessary because “infanticide is already illegal in every state.”
