Dick Durbin All-In for Ensuring Dead Babies

Written by Laurie Higgins

Here’s an excerpt from the disingenuous form letter U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) sends to constituents who plead with him to support the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act which would require doctors to provide health care to babies who survive efforts to kill them:

I believe that abortion should be safe and legal, consistent with Roe v. Wade. A decision that personal is best left to a woman, her family, her doctor, and her conscience. Although abortion is an issue that has divided Americans, I believe we can acknowledge a woman’s right to access safe reproductive health care services, while working to reduce the number of abortions.

The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, introduced by Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, was introduced with the stated purpose of ensuring that infants born alive during a failed abortion were not subsequently killed.

Under current federal law, it is already illegal for anyone—including a health care provider—to murder a newborn infant, including those who were born alive during the course of a failed abortion. In 2002, Congress passed and then-President Bush signed into law the Born Alive Infants Protection Act [BAIPA] (Public Law 107-207). This law provides that all federal protections for persons also apply to every infant born as a result of an “induced abortion.” I strongly support this law as it protects newborn infants, regardless of how they came into this world.

In 2013, a Pennsylvania doctor who was responsible for murdering babies after botched abortions was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. Dr. Kermit Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Gosnell case demonstrates that our nation already has laws in place that protect newborn infants.

Despite these existing protections, Senator Sasse introduced the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which I believe would only vilify women who need later-term abortions and the medical providers who perform them. … [W]e know that Senator Sasse’s bill would dictate exactly what type of medical care a doctor or nurse must provide and impose new criminal penalties, including jail time, on providers who do not comply with the new requirements.

The bill would have resulted in Congress dictating medical care to health care providers—something Congress traditionally does not do. …

Abortions later in pregnancy are extremely rare in this country. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, abortions after 21 weeks make up fewer than 1.3 percent of all abortions in the United States, and abortions after 24 weeks make up fewer than 1 percent. When later-term abortions happen, they can hardly be considered elective. Later-term abortions often happen in very difficult situations, such as when the life of the mother is in danger or when a severe and fatal fetal abnormality has been diagnosed. In cases where lethal fetal anomalies or complications that endanger a woman’s life exist, our government should not mandate the appropriate medical response.

Please note that Durbin has modified Bill Clinton’s politically expedient lie that he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Clinton’s equally duplicitous wife, doubled down on that lie when running in the 2008 Democratic primary, saying she thought abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare, and by rare, I mean rare.”

That pesky word “rare” raised a thorny question that “progressives” hated and that I once posed to Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor Andrew Koppelman at a debate:

If inchoate life is so devoid of personhood as to be undeserving of even minimal constitutional protection, why should abortion be rare.

Visibly nervous and with no good answer, Koppelman stammered something peculiar about hitting squirrels with your car. Awwwk-ward.

So, in 2012, Democrats removed the word “rare” from the Democratic Platform. Can’t have any language remaining that suggests something unseemly about mothers ordering the extermination of their children. No siree, can’t have that. A little Newspeak goes a long way in whitewashing consciences.

Durbin’s omission of “rare” from his rationalization exposes his dark heart and moribund conscience. Democrats no longer care if abortion is rare. Kill the babies, kill ‘em all. What do abortion-shouting Democrats care?

Due either to indefensible ignorance or dishonesty (surely the latter), Durbin claims that existing law—the Born Alive Infants Protection Act—provides sufficient safeguards to guarantee a baby who survives an attempted killing isn’t killed afterwards. But Tricky Dick lied by saying that Senator Sasse introduced his bill to ensure “that infants born alive during a failed abortion were not subsequently killed.” Nope, that’s not why Senator Sasse introduced his bill. He introduced his bill to ensure that infants who survive an abortion are not allowed to die by passive neglect.

Durbin says, “Under current federal law, it is already illegal for anyone—including a health care provider—to murder a newborn infant.” But Sasse’s bill doesn’t address a health care provider actively murdering a newborn. It addresses a doctor doing nothing and allowing a newborn to die.

Durbin doesn’t make clear that the existing law prohibits only Kermit Gosnell-like intentional murders. It does not require doctors to treat infants who survive abortions. The existing law does not prohibit death by passive neglect. Durbin needed to misrepresent Sasse’s bill in order to say that existing law achieves the same thing and, therefore, Sasse’s bill is unnecessary.

Melanie Israel, writing for the Heritage Foundation, makes clear what Tricky Dick tries to obscure:

While current law recognizes that all infants born alive are “persons,” babies who survive an abortion attempt are left vulnerable because the law provides for no requirements that health care practitioners treat the infant with the same degree of care afforded to any other newborn. … The BAIPA clarifies for purposes of federal law that “every infant…who is born alive at any stage of development” is a “person,” regardless of the circumstances—including induced abortion—surrounding birth. But it does not specify the obligations surrounding duty of care for such infants.

Durbin, trying to appease those science-affirming Illinoisans who believe the product of conception between two humans is a human and, therefore, deserve to be protected from slaughter, said “we can” work to “reduce the number of abortions.” Two questions for Tricky Dick:

1. Why should “we” work to reduce abortions if abortions have no moral meaning?
2. Who is “we”?

Durbin—who self-identifies as Catholic—employed the common and patently stupid euphemism “reproductive health care.” For the umpteenth time, killing humans is the antithesis of reproduction and health care.

Durbin rationalizes human slaughter by claiming “abortions in later pregnancy are extremely rare.” Well, I guess they’re rare in terms of percentage of all humans killed in the womb, but let’s look at numbers.

There are about 1,000,000 humans slaughtered in the womb in America each year, so using Durbin’s claim that “abortions after 21 weeks make up fewer than 1.3 percent of all abortions in the United States,” that comes to roughly 13,000 innocent human beings killed in the last trimester—humans with beating hearts who can feel pain—every year in the United States. That’s 13,000 humans whose slaughters evidently mean nothing to Durbin.

Here’s some information that Durbin likely doesn’t know but won’t likely matter to the pro-slaughter Durbin. According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute,

The true percentage is likely even higher, as 12 reporting areas are not reflected in the CDC’s estimate. These reporting areas account for more than half of all abortions performed in the United States, and all but one permit abortion on demand after 20 weeks.

In 2017, Chicago’s population was 2,716,000, and 650 people were murdered. That’s an “extremely rare” .0239 percent of the population. Since “progressives”—the majority of whom share Durbin’s view that the rarity of an evil action mitigates its enormity—run Chicago, perhaps that’s why the murder rate hasn’t changed. It’s just too low to matter.

Sophist Durbin claims that “When later-term abortions happen, they can hardly be considered elective.” Say what?! We have forced abortions here in the United States like they do in China?!

Ohhhh, wait, Tricky Dick has redefined elective abortions as non-elective abortions. He suggests that electively aborting a baby who has been “diagnosed with a severe and fatal abnormality,” is non-elective. Got it.

To be clear, Durbin believes non-defective humans have a moral right to kill defective humans, which sounds frighteningly like the Nazi belief that some lives are “unworthy of life.”

But what does electively aborting a baby with a severe and fatal abnormality have to do with requiring doctors to provide warmth, food, and oxygen to such a baby if she survives the attempt on her life? Seems like Tricky Dick is muddying up the waters with the swampy stuff he’s tracking in from D.C.

Yep, muddying waters is definitely what he’s doing, because he goes on to describe abortions where “lethal fetal anomalies or complications …  endanger a mother’s life”—yet another circumstance that’s irrelevant to a bill that requires doctors to treat newborns who end up not-dead. But I’m game. I’ll don my waders and trudge through Tricky Dick’s rhetorical muck.

Surely, Durbin knows there are no circumstances that require a doctor to kill a baby to save a mother’s life. There are emergency circumstances that require a pregnancy to be terminated to save a mother’s life, but despite what “progressives” pretend, terminating a pregnancy does not require the intentional killing of a human.

In a life-threatening emergency, a pregnancy can be terminated via a Cesarean section, following which a baby may die, which is entirely different from intentionally injecting a baby’s heart with digoxin to induce heart failure; or sucking out a baby’s brain and crushing its skull; or ripping off its limbs before yanking it out.

Durbin with nose a’growing and no discernible sense of irony writes that Sasse’s bill “would have resulted in Congress dictating medical care to health care providers—something Congress traditionally does not do,”—except, of course, when it does, as with Obamacare. And let’s not forget all those state legislatures that ban counseling for minors who experience unwanted same-sex attraction and/or gender dysphoria.

For Durbin to suggest that requiring a health care provider to provide health care to all newborns—including imperfect, unwanted newborns whose mothers want them dead—constitutes congressional overreach is both idiotic and obscene. And health care providers who don’t provide health care to newborns whose mothers want them dead should be penalized.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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