Rescuing babies who survive abortion Editorial
The medical malpractice of allowing babies born alive during a failed abortion procedure to die is a colossal evil of our time. It amounts to criminal negligence on the part of doctors and other health practitioners who allow it to occur.
This practice, however, could be outlawed in the event that the Human Rights (Children Born Alive Protection) Bill 2022, currently before the Senate, is passed by the Australian parliament.
The bill was introduced on November 30 last year by Senators Matthew Canavan (LNP, Queensland), Alex Antic (Liberal, SA) and Ralph Babet (UAP, Victoria). It followed the defeat in April last year, in the House of Representatives, of a similar bill drafted by the then LNP MP for Dawson in Queensland, George Christensen.
The Human Rights (Children Born Alive Protection) Bill 2022, if passed, would make it an offence by law across Australia in the event that health practitioners failed to provide medical care or treatment to a child born alive after a failed abortion.
Such an infant would be entitled to the same medical care (active treatment and/or palliative care) as any other child born alive in the usual way.
Furthermore, the bill would make health practitioners responsible for reporting births of children born alive as a result of terminations, to correct the problem of insufficient data.
Joanna Howe, a law professor at the University of Adelaide, wrote in February this year: "The abortion industry and proabortion media outlets assert that babies born alive and left to die following an abortion is a 'myth', 'nonsensical', and 'medically unnecessary'."
However, as she discovered from her own research, the publicly available statistics tell another story. Babies born alive after failed abortions and left to die are conservatively estimated to number hundreds annually across Australia.
How our parliamentarians vote on this bill will tell us a lot about what their priorities are and whether pro-life Australians should vote for them or not.
On one side is a brave minority of pro-life parliamentarians who regard the killing of the unborn as utterly abhorrent.
On the other side, opposing them, is a sizeable voting bloc of militant "pro-choice" parliamentarians committed to allowing abortion at all times and under all circumstances, with no exceptions, even if this means allowing abortions up to full term.
In the middle are the timid fence-sitters who wish that the whole issue would just go away. These are the MPs and senators who don't return phone calls to their pro-life constituents, or else reply to them with bland form letters assuring them that their views will be taken into consideration, but that they must understand that this is a morally-fraught issue… etc, etc.
About pro-abortion militants, the American columnist Matt Walsh once famously observed:
"As disturbing as it may be to see people who are so overcome with enthusiasm for killing babies, I am grateful for the spectacle. It is in these moments that the Left drops the thin veneer of compassion and shows its dark, demonic heart to the world. It is when their 'right' to abortion is threatened — even moderately threatened, even partially threatened — that modern Leftism becomes outright satanism…. Leftism is a violent, brutal, intensely self-centred ideology, and it requires all of its adherents to pledge absolute and undying loyalty to the abortion industry." (The Daily Wire, USA, September 5, 2018).
Uncommitted fence-sitters who refuse to lift a finger to rescue the perishing are scarcely any better.
The famous Jewish author Elie Wiesel — an Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate — had this to say to those who profess neutrality in the face of great evil: "Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." (Quoted in the New York Times, December 11, 1986).
Although the future prospects for the Human Rights (Children Born Alive Protection) Bill 2022 are not good, at least some Australian parliamentarians have shown that they are prepared to take the side of victims — in this instance, by taking a stand on behalf of babies born alive and left to die following an abortion.
That is why the bill's sponsors, Senators Canavan, Antic
and Babet, and their allies in both chambers of the Australian
parliament, deserve our encouragement and full support.
