North Carolina House fails to override governor’s veto of abortion survivors protection bill

As abortion advocates rail against various state pro-life laws being passed protecting preborn children after a heartbeat can be detected, they express no outrage over the fact that other state governments are voting against protecting older, viable preborn children who survive abortions. This week, the North Carolina House of Representatives failed to override Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of the “Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act.” The majority Republican House voted 67-53 to override the veto; approval from three-fifths of each chamber is required to override the veto, and this tally failed to meet the required number.

Senate Bill 359, the “Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act,” would have required that infants born alive in an attempted abortion be given medical treatment equal to any other child born at the same gestational age. The bill stated, “If an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person for all purposes under the laws of North Carolina and entitled to all the protections of such laws.”

READ: Abortionist: Even if a baby is born alive, parents don’t have to see it as a life

The bill would have required that infants born in an abortion facility be transferred to a hospital for further care. Under the bill, failure to provide care to a baby born alive in a botched abortion could have resulted in felony charges. Under the failed legislation, if a person “intentionally performs or attempts to perform an overt act that kills a child born alive,” he or she would commit murder.

Cooper, a Democrat, wrote in his veto letter in April, “Laws already protect newborn babies and this bill is an unnecessary interference between doctors and their patients.” While there is a federal law, the 2002 Born Alive Infants Protection Act, there are virtually no penalties for anyone who breaks the law, and the legislation does not require treatment for abortion survivors. This year, the United States Senate failed, once again, to pass an updated Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act that would have corrected some of these deficiencies.

Cooper went on to write that the bill would “criminalize doctors and other healthcare providers for a practice that simply does not exist.” But we know that babies are still being born alive in attempted abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control, which reports around 143 babies who died after being born alive during abortions between 2003 and 2014. The true figure, they say, is likely even higher.

If this practice truly did not exist and did not call into question the basis of legal abortion, why would the abortion industry fight legal protection for abortion survivors so vehemently?

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