One year ago this month, Senate Democrats blocked a request by Republicans to vote on a bill that would stop infanticide and provide medical care and treatment for babies who are born alive after botched abortions. The vote to stop the Democrat filibuster needed 60 votes but Democrats stopped the chamber from getting enough.
During the debate, several Democrats misled the Senate about the bill and falsely claimed the measure would ban abortions or ban late-term abortions. They made the usual pro-abortion claims that pro-life lawmakers hate women or somehow abortion is women’s health.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobucahr were among the senators refusing to protect babies who survive abortions from being left to die. While they voted to support infanticide, President Trump spoke out against infanticide in two tweets saying that it’s nothing short of “executing” babies to let them die after failed abortions.
Next week, they will have a chance to redeem themselves, but it’s highly unlikely they will go back on years of abortion advocacy and vote to support the pro-life legislation.
The Senate will soon vote on two major pro-life bills, to ban late-term abortions on babies capable of feeling excruciating pain during abortions and on the Born Alive bill that would stop infanticide and protect babies who survive abortions. But Sanders and Klobuchar will not support either pro-life measure.
Since that vote, Sanders has reconfirmed his support for abortions up to birth without compromise.
“When it comes to abortion, there is no middle ground,” he said in June.
And after Alabama passed a pro-life bill to ban abortions, Sanders called killing babies a “constitutional right.”
In January 2018, he voted against a bill to ban late-term abortions — a bill that would have saved as many as 18,000 unborn babies from abortions every year. The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act would have banned abortions after 20 weeks when unborn babies are capable of feeling intense pain. He will vote against that measure as well next week.
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After Klobuchar voted against the anti-infanticide bill last year, pro-life advocates protested at her office.
“Senator Klobuchar treats innocent human life the same way she treats her staff– with a complete lack of respect for dignity,” Students for Life leader Kristan Hawkins said at the time.
Klobuchar has a 0 percent pro-life voting record, according to National Right to Life. In addition to her infanticide vote, she also voted for taxpayer funding of elective abortions and taxpayer funding of the abortion industry. She voted to fund groups overseas that perform or promote abortions, and against a ban on abortions after 20 weeks.
Klobuchar also co-sponsored sweeping legislation that would have invalidated nearly all limits on abortion, at any stage of pregnancy.
Sadly, there is a very real need for the two senators to vote for the legislation. When it comes to infanticide, data reports from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) show the incidence of born-alive abortion survivors who are killed in the U.S. According to Congressional testimony:
Data that the CDC collects also confirms babies are born alive after attempted abortions. Between the years 2003 and 2014 there were somewhere between 376 and 588 infant deaths under the medical code P96.4 which keeps track of babies born alive after a “termination of pregnancy.”
The CDC concluded that, of the 588 babies, 143 were “definitively” born alive after an attempted abortion and they lived from minutes to one or more days, with 48% of the babies living between one to four hours. It also admitted that it’s possible the number is an underestimate.
We know it is an underestimate because these are just reported numbers from hospitals, not abortion facilities. Kermit Gosnell is only one abortionist who was responsible for “hundreds of snippings” of born-alive babies, yet he did not report even one. His numbers alone exceed the “definitive” numbers of the CDC.
Additionally, research by the American Center for Law and Justice estimated the number is much higher, at least 362 between 2001 and 2010.
Here’s more:
Our analysis is further supported by data from Canada that shows in the last reported ten years, “491 babies were left to die after they were born alive during abortions.” A look at how these statistics are recorded by Canada’s official recording agency (also using ICD-10 code P96.4), explained here and here, further confirms the data recorded by the CDC. In Britain it is reported that 50 babies are born alive as the result of botched abortions each year. Additionally, an “estimated 44,000 abortion survivors” are living in the United States today.
State figures also show babies possibly killed in infanticides. In fact, a report from Florida shows that at least six babies were born alive during abortions in that state in 2018. The report does not indicate what happened to them.
Moreover, a total of 19 states do not require any protection for babies born alive after botched abortions. Some states never have passed laws to protect abortion survivors, while at least one other, New York, recently repealed its law requiring medical care for infants who survive abortions.
While not nearly as common as early abortions performed in the first trimester, abortions performed at or after 24 weeks are hardly “rare.” In fact, the CDC estimates that roughly 13,000 of these late-term abortions are performed in the United States every single year. That’s enough unborn babies to fill up about half the L.A. Chargers football stadium.
When it comes to late-term abortions, thousands of them are done every year — and not for reasons some politicians say.
Abortion lobbyists admit that most late-term abortions are done on healthy mothers carrying healthy babies. Guttmacher Institute statistics confirm that “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” Instead, data suggest that “most women seeking later abortion fit at least one of five profiles: They were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding and then had access problems, or were young and nulliparous.”
And late-term abortionist Martin Haskell, who is credited with popularizing the partial-birth abortion procedure, said in a 1993 interview with American Medical News: “I’ll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range…. In my particular case, probably 20% are for genetic reasons. And the other 80% are purely elective.”
Last year, New York Magazine featured the story of an Oregon woman who aborted her unborn baby at 28 weeks of pregnancy even though they both were healthy.
Meanwhile, a new survey of abortion facilities in the U.S. has revealed a new, disturbing industry-wide trend that shows that overall in 2019, surgical abortion facilities have expanded into the late-term abortion market, where lucrative multi-day procedures can reap quick profits. Currently, there are 143 surgical abortion facilities that will conduct abortions at 20 weeks or more.
Over the past ten years, the number of abortion facilities that are willing to openly conduct abortions into the third trimester of pregnancy starting at 28 weeks changed little – until 2019 when the number jumped from six to eight.
Media outlets routinely describe the numbers of late-term abortions as ” very rare,” citing the fact that they account for only 1.3 percent of all abortions. But the percentage value minimizes the actual numbers.
There are more than 12,000 abortions annually after 20 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of the abortion lobby. It does not refer to the number of children who die annually in car crashes (about 4,000), gun violence (about 3,000), or childhood cancers (about 2,000) as “very rare.” Yet each of these tragic numbers is only a fraction of the 12,000 viable children aborted late in pregnancy.
But Sanders and Klobuchar ignore all of these statistics — because their allegiance is to abortion, not babies before or after birth.
