On January 22nd, the United States Senate could not find 60 senators to vote to overcome a filibuster and pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors’ Protection Act. Although S.6 garnered a majority–52-47–it needed 60 votes to pass. Every Republican voted for it (except Tennessee Sen. Bill Haggerty, who was absent); every Democrat voted against it.
For those unfamiliar with its purpose, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors’ Protection Act would require medical care and protection of any child born alive in the course of a third trimester abortion. The bill sets bars against passive and active post-birth euthanasia. Against passive euthanasia, the bill requires the child to receive the same standard of immediate medical care of any baby born alive at that gestational age, followed by immediate hospitalization of the infant (remember, even late-term abortions occur in some clinics). Against active euthanasia, the bill applies the federal definition of murder to the agent who performs such an act. Some versions of this type of legislation required an additional physician to be present during such an abortion to attend to a surviving child’s needs and overcome the conflict-of-patient-interest of the abortionist.
The Senate Democrats’ arguments against this kind of legislation fall into three baskets:
• The legislation is redundant because there are already state and federal requirements in this area. That’s not completely true because earlier requirements enacted during the Bush 43 Administration carried no penalties and, therefore, could be ignored. Furthermore, as we saw in the 2013 Kermit Gosnell trial in Pennsylvania, pro-abortion states don’t necessarily enforce the law or inspect what abortionists are doing. And, in Minnesota, Tim Walz downgraded the care standard required by such attending physicians, downgrading their obligation from having to “preserve” to just having to “care” for the infant’s life.
• Because S.6 applies penalties—mandatory reporting of passive neglect of medically distressed newborns, application of criminal penalties to healthcare personnel that actively kill a newborn—Democrats have tried to claim women would be penalized. Their opposition also mirrors the unique kind of legislation being pushed post-Dobbs in blue states, where abortionists (abortion is always the unique “medical procedure” getting a special pass) are immunized from extradition or accountability in another state if someone from that state suffers from medical malpractice. It’s the same deception used against the Alabama Supreme Court’s February 2024 in vitro fertilization (IVF) decision. That decision held clinic personnel liable for letting an unauthorized person enter and “damage” (i.e., kill) somebody else’s frozen embryos. To evade and minimize accountability, Big Fertility twisted that case into “banning fertility treatments” by making “frozen embryos into persons.”
• Any legislation that questions why any woman would procure any abortion is chilling and deterring of her rights, attacks her “autonomy,” “choice,” and “reproductive freedom,” and imposes “patriarchal control” (whether of spouse, physician, and/or state) on that “essential freedom.” Put succinctly: there’s no abortion that’s never good.
The paradox [https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2025/01/24/the-other-birthright-citizenship-problem/ ] is that many of the same people claiming that President Donald Trump is violating the Constitution through his executive order challenging birthright citizenship refuse to admit that the XIV Amendment establishes birth as an absolutely indisputable moment of acquisition of personal rights, which the Amendment explicitly specifies to prohibit anybody from being “deprived of life without due process of law.”
Late-term abortions can result in children surviving the procedure. The question is: what do we do with them?
Virginia ex-Governor Ralph Northam’s infamous 2019 radio interview revealed what is “standard” practice in many places: a child is delivered; he is resuscitated “if that’s what the mother and family desired”; the infant would be “kept comfortable” and “a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
In other words, whether or not a newborn is resuscitated or receives the appropriate level of care commensurate with his medical condition and/or injuries does not depend on the baby’s condition but “what the mother and family desired” and a maternal-medical “discussion.”
That is discrimination.
It frequently is discrimination against the handicapped, because many abortions occur in order to prevent the birth of a child with Downs Syndrome or some other genetic disease, abnormality, or handicap. In any other context, discrimination against a handicapped individual would be an aggravating factor to any other crime against him (e.g., assault, battery, or culpable neglect). Not necessarily in the neonatal nursery.
Northam’s “comfortable” criterion is exactly what that eugenics nursery espouses: “comfort care” that talks the talk about minimizing discomfort while a “discussion” decides whether the “comfortable” victim lives or dies.
At one time, “birth” was supposedly a bright line that separated and differentiated a “clump of tissue” from a “person.” But that line has been eroding.
Erosion started in the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration attempted to ban lethal discrimination against sick newborns after numerous reports came out that a child born with handicap was left to die on “quality of life” grounds. Reagan promulgated the “Baby Doe” regulations; hospitals fought in the courts to block them.
Another reason for erosion of the pre-/post-natal distinction is the abortionists’ refusal to disavow even late-term abortions. While feigning concern about such procedures, abortion orthodoxy denies that one can ever see any abortion that cannot be justified because, in the end, either it’s a “woman’s choice” (for any or no reason) or it isn’t. That’s why even where nominal restrictions on late-term abortions are written into law (e.g., the language of the proposed state constitutional amendment to enshrine abortion-on-demand in Virginia) the text is always written in such a way that “health” exceptions render any limits nugatory.
This was evident in the fight to ban partial-birth abortions that began in the Clinton Administration. Partial-birth abortion involves delivery of an infant up to his neck, followed by puncturing the skull and suctioning out brain matter before the collapsed head is removed (which is then a dead “birth”). Back then, there were still a few holdouts among Democrats for some pro-life protections, e.g., then-New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan memorably insisted the difference between abortion and infanticide cannot be three inches.
Well, yes, Dan, it could.
Finally, by 2011 we had the infamous Giubili-Minerva Journal of Medical Ethics article, titled “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” The two authors argued that there was no rational distinction between arguments justifying abortion prior to birth being incapable of applying after birth. In other words, the significance of “birth” is totally eroded. Providing grounds for a limited, no-questions-asked-post-natal return policy, Giubilini and Minerva closed the circle begun in the immediate wake of Roe when James Watson (one of the co-discoverers of DNA) recommended a child not be declared alive until three days after birth in case there was still need to eliminate him.
As a Catholic theologian, however, none of this surprises me. Life is a continuum and so, usually, are mindsets. If life is not inherently and uniformly valuable, then ebbing and flowing valuations will be set and they will be arbitrary, because they hang not on objective biological conditions but wishes, mindsets, and conveniences.
The erosion of biological and scientific facticity was significantly advanced by Roe but hardly began there. While St. John Paul II recognized in Evangelium vitae that contraception and abortion are distinct, he also recognized their roots are “fruits of the same tree” (#13).
If a child is not wanted before conception, one should not expect a robust and comprehensive love of life will arise after conception: the human mind does not work that way. That baby will be just as inconvenient before as after conception. What will–and has–happened is that scientific fact will be redefined to minimize the significance of conception. The fluid line between some methods of birth control that function both contraceptively and as abortifacients testifies to this.
The same process of erosion is now occurring at birth. In one sense, Giubilini and Minerva were right: if the child was not wanted before conception, he likely will be unwanted after. That baby will be just as inconvenient before as after birth. And if the deciding factor about should life exist ceases to be that life and becomes how one feels about that life, conception and birth cease to be steps in life development and become just arbitrary markers. There is no firm footing on a slippery slope.
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So-called modernity is competitive with so-called pre-modern societies…
Early Rome and Greece exposed to the elements those children deemed “unwanted.” And, in New Guinea the first child was even fed to the pigs and then the mother was forced to suckle a piglet. The distraught mothers stuck together to share and even participate in each others’ trauma. In pre-Muslim Arabia female babies were often buried alive in the sand dunes for any number of calculated reasons.
The customary abuse was normalized and socialized—just as now through feminist propaganda, professional society conformity, euphemisms, the social media, and now lock-step party-line votes. The “erosion” of fetal infanticide into post-birth infanticide…Pelosi’s “sacred ground” of outlier late term abortions (2013) is now mainstream.
But, this too…notwithstanding all of the later Qur’an’s internal contradictions that today lend themselves to terrorism, the seventh-century Mohammad apparently was the first Arabian leader to reject and prohibit female live burials (Qur’an verses 6:141, 152; 16:60-1; 17:31; and 81:3). And, probably from the much later hadith is then added this remark, delivered to a guilty father: “Sons and daughters are both gifts of God, the Prophet reminded him. Both are equally gifts, and so they should always be treated equally.” Today, “equally” with euthanasia?
But, in the faraway deserts of the seventh century, still a flicker of the inborn and universal Natural Law?
I believe it was JP II who stated to the effect that societies will fail when there are no protections for the most vulnerable.
My older friends have recently told me they must pay their coinsurance/deductibles up front now, in order to obtain certain medical tests that are clearly/easily verified as covered Medicare/Medicare Sup policies. Not sure what the situation is if they don’t have the Supplemental coverage. (I’m not sure if this is at a hospital facility or a physicians/clinic setting).
Who is actually valued in society, or is it the Almighty Dollar that holds the most sway?
This article points out some very disturbing facts and characteristics about the leaders of the “free” world.
Pray for the conversion of the left.
This is a solid observation. Life IS a continuity, and birth is the delivery of a life from one living space to another. I wish there were clearer regard for this continuity in talk and legislative appeals concerning “late-term” abortions vs. abortions, say, in the 1st 6-8 weeks of a pregnancy, and in the informational Pleas revolving around fetal development: as I’ll admit is often said, it’s a human life “from conception to death.” In other words, a member of the human family, as each of us is.
I’ve heard prolife people called “pro birth” as a sort of insult. Which seems very odd because obviously you want birth as the goal. Why protect the developing child in the womb and then abandon them at birth?
Because we want every child to have a safe delivery doesn’t mean we give up on them afterwards. But neither does it mean we have to embrace cradle to grave socialism.
Birth is no longer obviously the goal: it is an option, a “choice.” That’s where this problem really lies.
Thank you, that’s true in our society today but birth is the goal for pro lifers. We get accused of only caring about the child up to its birth and then taking no responsibility afterwards. And “responsibility ” usually translates to more social welfare programs, socialized medicine, public school funding, etc.
Thanks for the continued very fine coverage of these issues.
“While St. John Paul II recognized in Evangelium vitae that contraception and abortion are distinct, he also recognized their roots are ‘fruits of the same tree’ (#13)”.
Elephant in the room, maybe?
There is no middle ground on abortion until they love their children as much as we love our children.
Everything you say Mr. Grondelski is so true. But how do we get our parish priests to address these issues? Even when one of the Sunday readings has to do with a moral issue they pick one of the other readings to preach on. I have talked to some weekly Mass going parishioners about abortion and they believe, not as a practical matter to reduce abortions, but as an exception to any pro-life law that we should have abortion available for cases of rape or incest. I have talked to a parishioner who had a family member use IVF and he thought it was great. Describing to him what was involved did not change his mind.
In the very few cases where the USCCB or a local bishop writes an article on abortion they do not mention that this is a very serious sin and that people are endangering their souls and salvation.
Even with the abuse issues of the last 20 years, priests still have more credibility than a lay person on these issues. People can just brush me off. What do I know? How can we get these moral issues addressed at the parish level?
What can I say except to TELL THEM we want that kind of preaching?
The same attitudes toward those “inconveniently” born-alive babies is seen in light/ no penalties for mothers who commit infanticide. Mainstream media arouse sympathy for the mothers and the public largely follows their lead. Similarly, “mercy killers” generally got sympathy and even juries that refused to convict them in the days before legal euthanasia. Never will I forget a Belgian case in the 60s when parents killed a baby–say her name Gabrielle van der Put–handicapped by Thalidomide. Not only did those parents escape legal penalties, a large crowd gathered outside the courthouse to cheer them! No wonder Belgium is the worst place in Europe for euthanasia.
Poor little baby.
Weren’t Thalidomide birth defects used as a way to sway popular opinion on feticide? Weirdly enough Thalidomide is useful in treating symptoms of leprosy.
This reveals the work that’s still needed to get the kind of representation in Washington which respects ALL Americans, not just those in the special interest groups.
Don’t forget that a mid-term election is coming up in 2026 when we have a chance to further correct this abominable system that has deviated so far from the practice of simple compassion for the most vulnerable.
This is not the time to rest on the recent accomplishments achieved. You can be certain that the culture of death is already strategizing it’s attack plan.
I was listening to relevant radio today after Bishop Sheen and the masses and they replayed one of the recent callin shows – the priest was explaining to I believe a Catholic teenager about what pro choice actually means – he either told the kid or explained right after the teen was not on, that any Catholic helping someone get an abortion is automatically excommunicated.
This should be communicated in the parishes if this is the rule.
I did not know that and wonder if I heard him correctly.
Explained here, the first subheading: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/answers/abortion-excommunication-24758
But also read the second subheading “incurring excommunication,” and the third on “absolution.”
This is a fine article by Dr. Grondelski. I, too, was upset that the bill didn’t pass. My efforts as the pro-life representative from my parish for the diocese are disappointing because legislators constantly fail to show moral conviction. I’m continually calling and emailing them, but my state is firmly committed to the “culture of death.”
We must keep praying the Rosary and invoke Our Lady of Guadalupe’s intercession.
The article states:
“Every Republican voted for it (except Tennessee Sen. Bill Haggerty, who was absent); every Democrat voted against it.“
Let’s be frank.
The Democratic Party is a death cult. In issues that involve life and death, the Democrats *always* advocate death.
No exceptions.
Let’s pray that all Republicans continue to do the right things in the days ahead.
The Democrat Party can create nothing good. They can only destroy.
It’s time for our congress to firmly plant their feet in and DEMAND their rightful place in government. They must not cower down before bullying from the executive branch. The judiciary must also hold firm. Things could get out of control in a hurry if rightful boundaries are not kept. It’s good to have a strong leader, but in a democracy balance must be maintained and laws MUST be followed. Meaningful change takes time and we must be patient and allow things to proceed in due course.
The day is approaching when those who voted against this bill will have to answer to the ultimate authority.
Just a reminder – If it’s growing, it’s ALIVE