Holly Gatling, Executive Director, South Carolina Citizens for Life
COLUMBIA, S.C. – A State Senate Judiciary subcommittee Wednesday unanimously passed a version of the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA) that defines an infant born alive as a person even if the baby survives an abortion attempt. Basically the bill means that babies who are born alive under any circumstances cannot be treated as medical waste, or deliberately killed because they are unwanted. Now the bill moves to the full 23-member Judiciary Committee. The S.C. House overwhelmingly passed the BAIPA in 2011.
Columbia pediatrician Dr. Stuart Hamilton testified in favor of the bill in terms of compassion for infants who are born alive. Several other physicians opposed the state bill, although a federal born-alive infant protection act has been in effect for a decade.
Ten years ago the U.S. Congress passed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act after shocking reports that babies who survived induced-labor abortions at a hospital in Illinois were placed in a closet with soiled linens and left to die. That was the genesis for the National Right to Life Committee to promote the federal Born-Alive Infant Protection Act and similar state laws.
Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D., director of the National Right to Life Committee’s Department of State Legislation, commented after the subcommittee hearing. “The South Carolina Senate must recognize that children born alive as the result of an abortion should have the same protection of life as any other child born into this world,” she said. “It is simple humanity.”
She cited a February 23, 2012, article entitled “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” published in the international Journal of Medical Ethics shows where medical ethic is headed. (“After-Birth Abortion” is the authors’ term for infanticide.)
“The fact that they put an article in this kind of prestigious journal means the issue is on the rise,” Mrs. Spaulding Balch said. “It used to be whispered. Now it’s out there in black and white.” (See www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2012/03/author-says-she-was-just-using-logical-arguments-in-concluding-infanticide-acceptable.)
In the Journal article, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue that “killing a newborn should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is [permissible], including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” This idea is not new. Professor Peter Singer, who holds the DeCamp Chair of Bioethics at Princeton University, has long argued that the cold-blooded killing of newborn infants is not wrong. The Journal of Medical Ethics has removed the article from its website; however anyone who would like a copy can contact the SC Citizens for Life office at www.sccl@sclife.org and the article will be e-mailed.
In a memo to the subcommittee members, Holly Gatling, South Carolina Citizens Concerned for Life executive director, wrote that current law “leaves unanswered the question of when precisely a human fetus without legal protection becomes a legal person protected by law. Because South Carolina law has not adequately defined the line between fetus and legal person, newborn infants can be treated with horrific disregard that shocks the conscience.”
One example Ms. Gatling cited was a news report on February 5, 2003, in The State newspaper. The article recounted how workers at a Columbia laundry facility found the body of a premature infant with the dirty linens from a Clarendon County hospital.
The Born-Alive infant protection act, Gatling said, “would make it legally impermissible to dispatch infants with a blow of a hammer to their skull, or with the slice of a knife to their spinal cord.” The idea of such actions may seem outrageous, she said, but abortionist Kermit Gosnell faces six counts of murder for severing the spinal cords of newborn, living infants at his Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, abortion facility.
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