The only premise from which a rejection of born-alive protections can be mounted is the idea that a woman is entitled to terminate her responsibilities as a parent with lethal, violent force.

Politico is providing cover for Democrats desperately trying to avoid a vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which Republicans are trying to bring to a floor vote via a discharge petition. Melanie Zanona writes, “House Republicans on Tuesday launched a long-shot bid to force a vote on anti-abortion legislation — an issue they plan to hammer vulnerable Democrats on even if they can’t secure action on the floor.”

She reports a statement from Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) regarding the discharge petition: “Oh, my g-d. They just will not quit. . . I think politically, it’s a really bad move for them, and substantively, it’s a disaster.” The desperation of this statement is almost palpable. Pushing the issue is anything but a bad move for Republicans.

Zanona peppers her report with the usual deflections and falsehoods on abortion, saying abortions “very late in pregnancy” are “rare” and “often performed because of an underlying medical complication.” Obfuscating the core issue of infanticide by exposure, she merely states that Republicans have “seized” on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s “controversial” comments made “in defense” of a bill making it easier to get late-term abortions “when the health of the mother is at risk.”

This purpose of this bill is not to limit the abortion entitlement, however. As freshman Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas put it:

What this bill says is during an attempted abortion, and the baby is actually born alive, should the doctor actually save it? Now the next question you might ask is, why are we doing this? Is this a question that actually needs answering? Well no actually, because of policies proposed in Virginia and New York and Vermont, we feel that we actually have to put this into law. We actually have to put into law that a baby born with ten fingers and ten toes and a heartbeat, a baby that is breathing, deserves to live because it has value, because it is a human life.

While this bill does not directly threaten the legality of abortion whatsoever, the misinformation should still be addressed, because the truth leads to startlingly ugly conclusion about the motivations of Democrats in opposing the bill—and those do have to do with abortion.

It may surprise Zanona to learn that deliberately killing a preborn baby is never medically necessary. When the health or life of either patient is in danger from continuing the pregnancy, the child is delivered and care is administered to both patients according to standard medical practices. Sometimes those babies are too under-developed or too sick to survive, and that is nothing short of a tragedy.

The supposed rarity of late-term abortions is no excuse to reject basic protections for infants born alive after the attempt to kill them in the womb, either. Whether these abortions are committed once a year or a thousand times has exactly nothing to do with the morality of leaving infants, struggling to breathe, to die in utility closets or medical waste bins.

It would seem Democrats think some lives are, at the very least, not worth taking the time to protect. But that would be too generous an assumption, since they have spent more energy blocking 25 attempts to bring the bill to the floor and grandstanding about protecting alleged threats to “chip away at abortion rights” than it would take to just vote on the matter.

Democrats’ behavior with regard to this bill almost seems too repulsive to comprehend, even for people who take a “moderate” stance on abortion. Yet the left’s reasoning is shockingly straightforward when the facts about abortion are taken into account. As I wrote last time on the subject of born-alive protections: “Abortion is a pregnant woman employing lethal means to terminate her responsibilities as a mother.”

A woman’s health is not more adequately served by killing her child than through delivery. And whose autonomy is threatened by caring for an infant born after a botched abortion? If the mother does not want her child, the child becomes a ward of the state and can be adopted.

Is losing one’s “autonomy” for nine months through pregnancy, a well-known potential consequence that almost always results from consensual sex, such a terrible burden that to escape it is worth sacrificing another living human, sacrificing one’s own child? Is pregnancy, that incredible ability to help create and nurture new life, really a form of oppression?

The answer for House and Senate Democrats, 81 percent of whom had a 100 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America in 2017, is apparently yes. But it doesn’t explain why Democrats would oppose protections for abortion-survivors. While autonomy is a convenient argument for abortion, it is not the core motivation behind this entitlement.

The only premise from which a rejection of born-alive protections can be mounted is the idea that a woman is entitled to terminate her responsibilities as a parent with lethal, violent force. To allow an infant to survive the attempt to exercise this entitlement, even if they make it outside the womb, is to deny a woman her supposed right to kill her offspring.

Abortion is not really about a woman’s bodily autonomy or health. Legal abortion is fundamentally a mother’s entitlement to kill her child. When viewed in this light, one can understand why the left insists the bill is a threat to the abortion entitlement. It’s not just a deflection. They actually believe that abortion is the right to a dead baby.

Democrats are desperate to keep this ugly truth a secret, and that is why pro-life Republicans must press this issue as hard as they can. It’s well past time for the truth about abortion to be exposed.