As The Daily Wire’s Amanda Prestigiacomo reported last month, Senate Democrats blocked Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE)’s proposed Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act — which would have mandated that doctors attempt to keep alive babies who survive botched abortions, instead of allowing them to die.
“The bill amends the criminal code to ‘prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion,'” The Daily Wire noted.
But only three Senate Democrats — Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Bob Casey Jr. (D-PA), and Doug Jones (D-AL) — voted for the bill. The final tally was therefore 53-44 in the senior chamber — seven votes shy of the 60 votes needed to pass.
Now, as Conservative Review’s Nate Madden reports, House Republicans are planning to pick up where Senate Republicans left off:
House Republicans are making another move to get the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act to the floor of the chamber for a vote, but there’s another big hurdle they’ll have to clear.
Tuesday morning, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise announced that a discharge petition for the bill, which failed in the Senate, will be filed on April 2. The catch? It’ll have to be signed by a majority of House members to get the bill to the floor.
With the current House makeup, that will require all Republicans and 20 Democrats to sign the petition.
Right now, there are currently three vacancies in the House. With 197 House Republicans, the magic number for a majority is 417, instead of the 418 required under normal circumstances. That leaves Republicans with a lot of ground to cover.
When the House voted on another major pro-life bill last session, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, just three Democrats broke ranks to vote to ban abortions after 20 weeks at the federal level: Reps. Dan Lipinkski, D-Ill., Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, and Collin Peterson, D-Minn.
“BREAKING → I’ll be filing a discharge petition on @RepAnnWagner’s Born Alive bill on April 2nd,” tweeted House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA). “This petition will bypass Nancy Pelosi & force a vote on the floor to #EndInfanticide if a majority of members sign on. Tell your representative to sign this petition! #LetUsVote.”
The bill stands very little chance of passing, due to Republicans being in the House minority. Instead, the purpose of the bill is likely to merely put on record House Democrats as to whether or not they support a federal mandate opposing actual, post-birth infanticide.
As The Daily Wire also noted, Sasse’s bill had been introduced in response to a spate of late-term abortion bills that gained ground in key blue states across the country. Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam appeared to endorse actual infanticide, and New York signed an extremely permissive late-term abortion law.
The past few months have highlighted the Democrats’ abortion radicalism. As previously reported by The Daily Wire, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Catholic Democrat, recently signed and celebrated the passing of the euphemistically-named Reproductive Health Act, which legalizes abortion up to the moment of birth, loosens restrictions on who can perform abortions, and strips the murder of the unborn (including the murder of wanted babies) from the state’s criminal code.