January 10, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — As America prepares to vote whether to keep or replace President Donald Trump in less than a year, left-wing media are attempting to delegitimize some of the incumbent’s most potent arguments, such as the current legislative stalemate over anti-infanticide legislation.
This week, Vice “reproductive rights” staff writer Marie Solis claimed that the specter of live-birth abortions is an “unfounded myth” that Trump and his pro-life allies will deploy as their “go-to abortion lie in 2020.”
“In reality, only 1.2 percent of abortions occur at or after the 21-week mark — 66 percent occur in the first eight weeks, and 92 percent occur by week 13,” Solis wrote, citing 2013 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) numbers. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 143 recorded deaths associated with infants who resulted from an attempted abortion between 2003 and 2014, and many states have reported zero live births out of thousands of abortion procedures.”
“Advocates say the bill could make it so that providers who don’t try to resuscitate infants unlikely to survive for more than a few hours could face felony charges,” she continued. “They also worry that those potential legal repercussions would force providers to go against some patients’ wishes that a newborn with a terminal diagnosis receive palliative care rather than undergo futile medical intervention.” The piece does not offer reasons to believe that either possibility is likely.
Several former abortion industry insiders and policy scholars have told Congress that many cases of infanticide are not captured by the official numbers.
“There have been many cases and multiple witnesses who have come forward and admitted that they saw babies either actively or passively killed after they survived an abortion,” retired OB/GYN and former abortionist Dr. Kathi Aultman testified last September. “In Florida, a woman who had laminaria placed in her cervix to dilate it returned for her procedure, but the doctor was late, and she delivered a live baby girl at 23 weeks. A clinic owner with no medical experience snipped the cord and placed the still living baby and the placenta in a biohazard bag. The remains were found by police a week later after several calls from an informer.”
Tessa Longbons, a Charlotte Lozier research associate, also testified that CDC data found 143 infant deaths from 2003 to 2014 that had been coded as induced abortion or spontaneous miscarriage. The data “may be a considerable undercount,” as just seven states (Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Texas) have provided data on at least 160 babies to survive abortions.
Further, the lawmakers pushing to mandate care for abortion survivors are simultaneously pushing legislation to obtain a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of how frequent failed abortions really are, by requiring states to report any occurences of a child being delivered alive after an attempted abortion.
The deficiencies of abortion data have long been recognized as a problem in this and other abortion-related policy debates. The CDC admits that it collects only abortion data voluntarily submitted by states, whose reporting requirements (if they have any) vary significantly. California, Maryland, and New Hampshire — three populous, relatively abortion-friendly states — submit no data whatsoever, further limiting the public’s and policymakers’ understanding of just how common late-term abortions and abortion complications are.
The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute adds that only 43 states “report gestational age with enough granularity to allow for a count of late-term abortions.”
Regardless of how frequently babies survive abortions, the fact remains that even PolitiFact has acknowleged that the existing federal laws on the subject, the Child Abuse Prevention & Treatment Act of 1974 and the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, do not contain criminal penalties for withholding medical treatment from newborns, something pro-lifers want to rectify via the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.