Born Alive Infants Protection Act Won't Pass Congress This Year

Source: National Review

Date: October 27, 2000

Born Alive Infants Protection Act Won't Pass Congress This Year The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2000 will not pass Congress before members adjourn this weekend. The House version of the bill, which would have provided federal protection to living, fully born babies who survive abortions, passed last month by a vote of 380 to 15. While the passage of the live-birth-abortion bill in the House was a small victory for the pro-life cause, Democratic members in the Senate short- circuited it when they objected to a request by Majority Leader Trent Lott to pass the bill by unanimous consent. Speaking on behalf of absent members who wanted to offer amendments, Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota objected to the unanimous-consent request-- and thus postponed the day when Congress would recognize that babies enjoy full legal protection once they are born. The Senate bill would have affirmed that "infants who are born alive are persons entitled to the protection of the law, and that live birth occurs whenever an infant, at any stage of development, is expelled from the mother's body and displays any of several specific signs of life-- breathing, a heartbeat, or definite movement of voluntary muscles." As Hadley Arkes, a professor of jurisprudence at Amherst College, proposed first in the pages of National Review, a law must be passed in order to ensure that babies who survive abortion are protected. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on July 20, Arkes argued that the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act 2000 "offers the most modest and the gentlest step that is imaginable in dealing with the question of abortion; and at the same time it is the approach that goes most deeply to the root of things." But given the contentious history of abortion in our country -- not to mention the ferocity of pro-abortion groups such as NARAL -- it is no surprise that the definition of what it means to be a "child born alive" has yet to be resolved. Or even matter.