Show-Me 'Born Alive Bill' Complications

Crafting policy is all about the deets . . . Agree or disagree . . . Here's important considerations pointed out by prog bloggers and many progressive opponents of the current GOP crackdown . . . 

Because the public is largely supportive of abortion early in pregnancy, abortion opponents like to focus on later procedures. Because people who don’t want to be pregnant have abortions as early as possible, abortion opponents vilify procedures that are often needed due to medical tragedies in very wanted pregnancies.

“Born Alive” bills, introduced in many states and federally, are based on the lie that viable babies are surviving failed abortions and need legal protection from infanticide or medical neglect. This is not a thing. 

What is very much a thing is that sometimes pregnancies go very wrong, forcing would-be parents to make very difficult decisions. Some parents who learn their baby has a life-limiting anomaly prefer not to have demise occur in utero so that they can meet the baby that they know will not survive. 

Inducing labor to end a doomed pregnancy is not what most people think of as an “abortion,” but it meets the definition under Missouri law, which is “the intentional termination of the pregnancy of a mother by using or prescribing any instrument, device, medicine, drug or other means or substance with an intention other than to increase the probability of a live birth or to remove a dead unborn child.” 

That state law once explicitly excluded removal of a “dead or dying unborn child,” but our legislature deleted “or dying” in 2019.

The “Born Alive” legislation mandates that after an abortion, a medical professional must “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care and diligence to preserve the life, health and comfort of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care provider would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.” 

That will be read by some doctors and hospital attorneys to mean dying babies must receive aggressive and futile medical interventions.  

It jeopardizes the option of what the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists calls perinatal alliative comfort care, which is exclusively palliative care without the intent to prolong the baby’s life.

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

Missouri's new anti-abortion law will hurt families in medical crisis * Missouri Independent