Abortion shouldn’t mean killing newborns; Titus, Rosen, Kihuen disagree

Two weeks ago, the U.S. House approved the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. After a botched abortion, the bill requires that health care personnel work to “preserve the life and health of the child” and ensure the baby is transported “immediately” to the hospital. It imposes criminal penalties on someone who kills a child born alive. It also protects mothers from prosecution.

This bill would change nothing if an abortionist successfully kills an unborn child while he or she is in the womb. It’s only after the child is born that the law would take effect and perhaps save the life of someone such as Melissa Ohden.

“I survived my birth mother’s saline infusion abortion 40 years ago at St. Luke’s Hospital in Sioux City, Iowa,” Ohden told The Daily Signal.

“Although there were demands made to leave me to die in that hospital room that day,” she said, “ultimately a nurse rushed me off to the NICU [Neonatal Intensive Care Unit], because, in her words, I ‘just kept gasping for breath,’ and she couldn’t just leave me there to die.”

Ohden now has two daughters of her own.

Ohden was one of the lucky ones. A 2016 congressional investigation found evidence that a Texas abortion provider frequently murdered children born after failed abortions. An employee testified that, during a typical week, the abortionist, whose name was redacted, would perform 40 abortions on unborn children at “20 or more weeks gestation.”

Of those 40, “approximately three or four infants would show signs of life,” said the employee in an affidavit. “This typically happened when infants were extracted from the cervix in a breech position. … In all such cases, (name redacted) would terminate their lives. The signs of life they exhibited would include movement of the stomach as the infant breathed or movement of the toes or fingers.”

Imagine that. A newborn baby lying there. Not seen as a precious gift from God, but as a problem needing to be taken care of. It was no contest, of course. There are numerous ways for an abortionist to kill a defenseless newborn.

“Some of the methods included “snipping the infant’s spinal cord with scissors; cutting the neck with Sopher forceps or similar instruments; twisting the infant’s head; using forceps, other instruments, or his finger to crush the ‘soft spot’ of the infant’s head, or crushing it by the same means through its stomach; or inserting his finger down its throat,” testified the employee.

Keep that in mind the next time you hear Planned Parenthood claim abortion is “health care.”

Another employee made some of the same allegations. The congressional investigation also found a third employee who testified she “learned from her coworkers of numerous infants whose lives were terminated … after showing signs of life following partial or full extraction from the uterus.” The report didn’t name any of the employees.

Despite all the rancor in Washington, D.C., surely both parties could agree that doctors should work to save newly born babies. Or at least that doctors shouldn’t murder them once they’re born. Nope.

Just two Democrats voted for advancing the bill, which passed 228-189. Nevada’s Democratic representatives, Dina Titus, Jacky Rosen and Ruben Kihuen, voted no.

Those three followed the lead of Planned Parenthood. But even the abortion giant could defend its position only by using misleading statements, such as saying the bill would “criminalize abortion providers.”

That statement is intentionally incomplete. The bill would criminalize abortion providers who murder babies after they have been born. Even if you support abortion, why oppose that?

The offices of Titus, Rosen and Kihuen refused requests to explain their votes.

No wonder. It was a shameful, barbaric vote.

Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Listen to him discuss his columns each Monday at 9 a.m. with Kevin Wall on 790 Talk Now. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.