Yesterday, the Democrat party secured its status as the Party of Death. Every Democrat in the US Senate voted against allowing the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act to move forward. The vote was 52-47, but the bill required a 60-vote majority to move forward.

The bill, introduced by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), would require every healthcare practitioner present at the birth of a child who survives an abortion to “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a … health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.” So, if a child survives an abortion, and there are children who do, then the healthcare workers present would be legally obliged to provide the necessary care to keep that child alive.

Someone please explain to me how anyone could vote against this bill. It doesn’t interfer with women who want to procure legal abortions. It doesn’t interfer with the doctors who want to provide abortions. It doesn’t allow for the prosecution of the woman who procured the attempted abortion. It does penalize healthcare workers who refuse to provide care for children who survive abortions. But in those circumstances, you have a living, breathing, born alive child. What else is any healthcare worker who has a grain of moral integrity going to do under those circumstances? The fact that this bill is even needed is a judgment on our healthcare community. Children who have survived abortions have been left to die.

Pro-abortion advocates would have us believe that children surviving abortions is so rare as to be hardly worth considering. This isn’t true, but even if one child survives an abortion, shouldn’t that child be given the care necessary to live? According to the USCCB Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities’ position paper on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, between 2003-2014 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in their analysis of death certificates for states that report information on abortion survivors, at least 143 children were born alive but then died after an attempted abortion. Arizona reported ten babies born alive after an attempted abortion in a period of just five months in 2017. Canada reported that from 2013 – 2018, 766 children were born alive after an attempted abortion and left to die. So there are children who survive abortions and, too often, in the absense of legal protections, these children are left to die.

We have become a society where a person’s dignity is determined by the circumstances of their conception, or the willingness of his or her mother or father to recognize such dignity. If the mother, or the father pressuring the mother, does not recognize the dignity of her child, then our society says the child has no dignity. If the mother, however, recognizes the dignity of another child of hers, even at the same gestational age, then society recognizes the dignity of that child. The child’s dignity is not connected in any way to the fact that they are a human being made in the image of God. The child’s dignity is only recognized if the mother recognizes his or her dignity and decides to continue with the pregnancy. This ideology is maintained even if the child is born alive. The thinking is, since the mother desired to kill the child by abortion, then the mother doesn’t recognize the dignity of her child. So, the child possesses no inherent dignity, and he or she may be killed or left to die. But should the mother get pregnant again and recognize the dignity of her child, and this time medical matters require the delivery of the child at the same gestational age as the child who was earlier born and left to die, then society and the medical team working on the mother and child will recognize the dignity of the child and do all they can to preserve the child’s life.

This cannot stand. The dignity of a human being simply cannot be so arbitrarily determined by the whims or desires of any particular person, even the mother who carries that human being in her womb. If that is true, then no one is secured in their dignity. The State could assume control over a person for whatever reasons – disability, dementia, homelessness, chronic illness, whatever – and determine that such a person no longer possesses a dignity that others are bound to respect. There is a long history of people in positions of power over others refusing to recognize their intrinsic human dignity and acting against them in horrific and deadly ways.

Abortion Survivors Network is an organization that seeks to make known the reality of abortion survival, to share the stories of abortion survivors, and to support both people who have survived abortions, and the mothers of failed abortions. It is worth checking out their website. Abortion advocates would like to pretend that abortion survivors don’t exist. They insist that the only reason for late term abortions is the save the life of the mother from a life-threatening pregnancy, or because the child has a genetic anomaly inconsistent with life. Of course, killing the child is not the only way to end a pregnancy. If a mother is experiencing a life-threatening pregnancy, the solution is to deliver the child. The pregnancy is then over, the threat to the mother ended, and the child may live. There is nothing lost in delivering the child, and the child may be saved. Of course, if all late-term abortions were because of a condition in the child inconsistent with life, then how is it that so many people have survived abortion without life-threatening conditions?

The bottom line is, pro-abortion advocates oppose this bill for one reason and one reason only: the mother paid for a dead baby, and they insist that she get a dead baby. The doctor is there to kill the child, not save his or her life. He or she isn’t being paid to save a life, but to take one. Why would he or she be incentivized to save the life of the child? Because moral integrity demands it? That’s funny! People who have any shred of moral integrity don’t usually enter a profession where killing people is what you get paid for. Unfortunately, even nurses have succumbed to this thinking, refusing to lift their hands to save the child when the doctor tells them “NO!”

“The measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members.” This quote, attributed to Mahatma Ghandi, well expresses the requirement of a civilized people to treat with dignity those who are completely dependent on others. None fit this description better than those in the womb, who cannot speak for themselves, but are so often attacked for their lack of being able to care for themselves. How can we claim the identity of a civilized people when we regularly kill our own children, the least among us? Let’s not forget, too, the charge Jesus gave to everyone who hopes for eternal life: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Mt 25:40). Do we really expect that Jesus will open the kingdom for us if we kill the least of His brothers and sisters? What answer will we give Him when we stand before Him with the blood of our children on our hands?

Is this too harsh, or too judgmental? I don’t think so. We are killing our children. Perhaps a bit of harsh judgment is what is needed to open the eyes of our country regarding what is happening in our midst. Where do we stand? We cannot be silent. Silence to violence.

Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.