On April 14, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives will launch a new effort to save the lives of newborn babies who have survived abortion.
As they did during the 116th Congress, Republicans will launch a discharge petition in an effort to have a vote on H.R. 619, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which the Democratic leadership does not even want to allow House members to consider.
The discharge petition is a tool available to the minority party when the majority party doesn’t want to deal with a particular bill.
The minority — in this case, the Republicans — can introduce a petition directly to the House membership in an attempt to garner enough signatures to force the House leadership to take up the bill.
House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., led the charge on the bill and its discharge petition in the 116th Congress. The petition collected 205 signatures. All Republicans signed it, but only three Democrats. That effort fell 13 signatures short of the needed 218.
The Democratic majority has narrowed in the current Congress, where the Republicans have gained seats and can come closer to the required number of signatures. It will still need a handful of Democrats to muster enough of a conscience and courage to sign the petition.
These Democrats don’t even have to be willing to vote for the bill itself; they just have to be willing to allow it to be debated on the House floor and finally subject to a vote.
If these men and women who were elected to Congress are not willing to even discuss a bill protecting babies born alive, what are they doing in public office?
They don’t belong there.
The Democrats are working hard to ignore this bill because they don’t want to go on record voting against providing life-saving care for a newborn baby.
But the introduction of the discharge petition puts them on record anyway, and if they don’t sign it, all the voters in their district need to know that prior to the midterm elections.
Some Democrats might point to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act that became law in 2002 and say that’s’ enough protection.
But that law is only definitional; it says these newborn survivors are persons under the laws of the U.S., but it stops there and does not penalize any failure to protect these survivors.
President Donald J. Trump consistently called on Congress to increase the protections for these children, and issued an executive order to see to it that existing laws regarding babies born prematurely for any reason were carefully enforced.
The new bill — and one like it that passed the House in the 115th Congress when Republicans were in control, and one introduced last year that never got to the floor — has real teeth. It insists that emergency life-saving care, including transfer to a hospital, be initiated immediately after the baby is free of the birth canal.
Abortion providers who fail to provide this care would be penalized.
Democrats and other pro-abortion advocates say this bill is unnecessary because – according to their fantasy world — babies do not survive abortion.
But the inconvenient truth is that they do.
In some late term abortion procedures the child may inadvertently slip out through the forcibly-dilated cervix before the abortionist reaches in to dismember or otherwise kill the child.
In other late term procedures, which are essentially pre-term deliveries, the abortionist may try to kill the baby first by injecting digoxin into the heart, but might fail to do it correctly, or not wait long enough for the baby to die while still in the womb.
In cases where the abortionists want to harvest the body parts for use in research, they will not use digoxin at all, since it poisons the body.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has documented 143 cases of babies born alive after abortion.
The seven states which keep records of these cases have indicated 160 cases.
In 2020, for example, Florida recorded seven babies who survived abortion.
Once born, these children deserve equal protection under the law and an equal standard of care as any other baby born at the same stage. Instead, we continue to see babies left alone to die, or actively killed. Others survive and join the hundreds of men and women who comprise the Abortion Survivors Network.
I urge everyone who can to watch the proceedings in the House on April 14 as more than 200 representatives line up to sign the discharge petition as the first step in saving these babies’ lives.
Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., the youngest female Republican to serve in the House, will manage the petition. The abortion issue is personal for her; her own mother had to resist pressure to have an abortion while pregnant with her.
I’ve also urged my supporters to call their representatives to encourage them to sign the petition. More details are available at BornAlive.US.
Fr. Frank Pavone is one of the most prominent anti-abortion leaders in the world. He became a Catholic priest in 1988 under Cardinal John O'Connor in New York. In 1993 he became the fulltime National Director of Priests for Life. He is also the President of the National Pro-life Religious Council, and the National Pastoral Director of the Silent No More Campaign and of Rachel's Vineyard, the world's largest ministry of healing after abortion. He travels the nation assisting pro-life advocates to end abortion, and broadcasts regularly on television, radio, and internet. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, St. John Paul II, and the Trump Campaign are among those who have sought his input on pro-life matters. He has helped foster the anti-abortion activities of the Catholic Church worldwide by having served at the Vatican as an official of the Pontifical Council for the Family and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life. Read Fr. Frank Pavone Reports — More Here.
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