Republican lawmakers from the House of Representatives used their new majority on Wednesday to promote a bill to protect the “born alive”in one of the first votes they take in the new Congress and which shows their announced intention to restrict the right to abortion in the United States, after the decision of the Supreme Court that repealed the protection of that right in the case Roe vs. Wade.
The largely symbolic move would require that health care providers provide care for babies born after an attempted abortion.
health providers are already required by law to act to provide medical services to any baby born at any gestational age. The House bill also criminalizes the “intentional killing of a live-born child,” conduct that is illegal in the United States.
The Born Alive Infants Protection Act, enacted in 2002, says that any child born at any stage of development, even after a potential abortion, must be considered a “person” and a “human being,” and therefore has entitled to the same legal protections.
The measure, which passed 220-210, has virtually no chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate. Rep. Henry Cuellar, the only House Democrat who does not support abortion rights, voted in favor of the bill.
The fact that the Republicans have chosen this law as one of the first to vote in this 118th Congress is a sign that the fight against the right to abortion and the defense of life will be one of their priorities in the last two years. of the Joe Biden government.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says these measures take decisions out of the hands of doctors, which it forces doctors to “administer interventions even when there is no chance of survival.”
In the opinion of Planned Parenthood, the largest network of reproductive services clinics in the US, the bill is “deliberately misleading and offensive to pregnant people and the doctors and nurses who provide their care” and one more tactic to generate “artificial fear,” used to stigmatize abortion, said Jacqueline Ayers, vice president of the organization’s department of politics and campaigns, in a statement.
It is, Ayers added, “yet another attempt by anti-abortion politicians to spread misinformation as a means to achieve their twisted goal: to ban safe and legal abortion.”
Existing laws already require doctors to provide adequate medical care, so this “misleading” bill creates “a problem that doesn’t exist,” Ayers added.
The second measure approved today in the House of Representatives condemns the attacks “against pro-life facilities, groups and churches, that is, that restrict or prohibit the right to abortion, which has no legal weight.
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Source: La Opinion
