Days into their control of the House of Representatives, Republican lawmakers approved two abortion-related bills on Wednesday, including a measure fuelled by a falsehood that infants are often “born alive” during an abortion attempt and killed by providers.
The misleadingly titled “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” prohibits the “intentional killing of a born-alive child,” which is already illegal, and would impose heavy fines and up to five years in prison against providers who do not act to “preserve the life and health of the child”.
The measure has been widely criticised by abortion rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers, who argued that Republicans have painted a misleading image of “botched” abortion care and the difficult family circumstances involving abortions that are inconsistent with deeply personal healthcare decisions involving nonviable pregnancies.
The rights of infants born by any method, including after vanishingly rare instances after an attempted abortion, already are protected under bipartisan legislation from 2002. In reality, as with most abortions performed late enough in pregnancy for survival to be possible, such cases involved abortion care to protect the life of the pregnant patient or because of lethal fetal anomalies.
The bill will not survive a vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Democratic House Whip Katherine Clark’s office said the bill “unnecessarily restates current law requiring a doctor to provide the same standard of medical care for an infant born during an abortion procedure as they would for any other infant.”
“It is a crime now to kill a child born alive,” Democratic US Rep Madeleine Dean told lawmakers on 11 January. “Either my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are unaware of the existing crime … or this is another extreme political stunt.”
Republicans are “not interested in medical truths” but in “scaring people,” according to Ms Dean. “Politicians have no business making unsound medical decisions. We are legislators, not doctors,” she said.
Democratic US Rep Jerry Nadler said the “ill-conceived” Republican bill, which did not receive any committee testimony or input from medical experts before it was offered up for a vote, puts infants and pregnant people at “greater risk in service of politics”.
In November, voters in Montana rejected a similar referendum from the state’s Republican lawmakers that would require physicians to “take necessary actions to preserve the life of a born-alive infant” or face up to 20 years in jail and a $50,000 fine.
But anyone who “purposely, knowingly, or negligently causes the death of a premature infant born alive, if the infant is viable” already faces criminal penalties under the law. Opponents said the proposal, intended to draw support for an anti-abortion agenda, raised a baseless claim among anti-abortion activists that children are “born alive” after “failed” abortions and then killed.
A statement signed by more than 700 providers in the state said the measure amounts to government-mandated “aggressive treatment for newborns for whom no amount of medical care will save, and may instead prolong suffering and severely disrupt families’ grieving process” and deny those families “the choice to spend precious time with their infant, even to provide spiritual care.”
“This has nothing to do with abortion,” they wrote. “The reality is that this represents government interference in the patient-physician relationship at times when families need compassionate care and trust in their health care professionals the most.”
House Republicans also passed a largely ceremonial resolution on Wednesday to condemn attacks on “pro-life facilities, groups and churches.” The resolution passed 222-209.
Newly elected Democratic US Rep Maxwell Frost, in his first remarks on the House floor, called the resolution a “one-sided” decree “meant to fan the flames of anti-abortion, anti-freedom sentiment.”
The resolution notably does not condemn violence towards abortion providers and clinics. Abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America has collected 7,200 reported acts of violence towards abortion providers since 1975, including 42 bombings, 185 arson attacks, and “thousands of death threats.” The group reported 11 murders and 26 attempted murders between 1993 and 2016.
Mr Frost said Republicans have sent a “very dangerous message that will embolden actors behind them.”
Mr Nadler called the measure “tacit acquiescence to extremist violence against abortion providers” and a “transparent political exercise intended to lay the groundwork for a total abortion ban”.
“These bills make it plain: House Republicans are patently rejecting the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans who voted to support legal abortion in November,” NARAL Pro-Choice America president Mini Timmaraju said in a statement. “Meanwhile, our Democratic reproductive freedom champions in the House are ready and willing to fight to restore and expand access to abortion – and we thank them for that.”
Both measures were introduced ahead of the 50th anniversary of the landmark US Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade, which the nation’s high court reversed in June of 2022 in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization that revoked a constitutional right to abortion care.
Abortion rights dominated midterm election campaigns, and abortion rights prevailed in several states where abortion issues were directly proposed to voters.
“If you look at the midterms there’s a reason why we have a very slim majority,” Republican US Rep Nancy Mace told reporters on Tuesday. “I think women’s issues are a problem we need to address. We need to be more open, more transparent and more compassionate to women.”
