House advances ‘born alive’ bill

A House subcommittee voted 5-3 along party lines to advance what supporters call a “born alive” bill that would require healthcare providers to provide professional care to infants who survive failed abortion attempts and terminated pregnancies.

The bill, HB 1795, proposed by Del. Nick Freitas, R-Culpepper, specifies that practitioners who do not abide by this level of care would be guilty of a class four felony and would face possible disciplinary action by the Board of Medicine.

“I believe we have a duty to ensure that our medical professionals understand that the expectation is that they are going to do whatever they can to try to protect the life of [a child born alive after a failed abortion attempt],” Freitas said during a House Courts of Justice subcommittee meeting Monday.

Del. Phillip Scott, R-Fredericksburg, a co-patron, said he supported this bill because he could not oppose taking proper care of living humans.

“I think the way it’s been named is plain enough,” Scott said. “I mean, if a child is born alive … I find it very hard to say, ‘Okay, they are living and they are outside the womb, then we should let the parents decide what happens to that child.’ I don’t know how you oppose that.”

Scott also said the bill will rectify the ongoing debate about how to treat an infant that is no longer in the womb.

“Those that are pro-choice or pro-abortion, they always talk about the child being inside the mother, it depends on the mother, now we are talking about the child being outside the mother and to what end is this conversation going to end, is it going to stop,” Scott said.

Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation, thinks that this bill would allow people to acknowledge how important it is to save lives, she wrote in an email statement.

“Saving a life that has been born should be common sense without debate,” Cobb wrote. “Last year a survivor of an attempted abortion testified to this bill, and right afterward opponents of the bill claimed the bill was a solution in search of a problem; yet the ‘problem’ had been sitting in that exact chair just moments before. It’s time to recognize that all life is precious.”

The bill is receiving pushback from abortion-rights advocates and organizations.

Jamie Lockhart, executive director Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, said “born alive” bills would be a tactic for certain politicians to induce fear and danger to women and their doctors.

“So-called ‘born alive’ bills are vehicles for anti-abortion politicians to push misinformation, to soak fear and bully patients and providers with the ultimate goal of banning abortion,” she said. “These bills are completely unnecessary as medical professionals are already obligated to provide appropriate medical care. To suggest otherwise is false, offensive and dangerous.”

Lockhart said she worries that a bill like HB 1795 signed into law would create a more complicated healthcare system.

“It would put providers in very difficult conditions and create fear unnecessarily about what kind of medical care could be provided,” she said.