We have witnessed an insult to the sanctity of life.

Today, in a 53-44 vote, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act failed to break filibuster and pass through the United States Senate.

The act would have ensured protection for infants surviving an abortion attempt. The surviving infant would receive the same life-saving care which is extended to a child that is born at the same gestational age in a premature birth, and would subsequently be sent and admitted to a hospital for further protective treatments after proper care was taken by the abortionist. If these steps were not taken, the abortionist would face a fine and a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

In layman’s terms, if the doctor did not do everything in his or her power to attempt to protect a child’s life, the doctor would be punished.

Those in opposition to the act claimed it was a mimic of a 2002 bill that protected the rights of a child born at any stage of development. They also claimed that this act was pointless because of the rarity of late-term abortions and children surviving abortion and it was simply an attack on women’s reproductive rights.

This has nothing to do with reproductive rights.

This act would go into effect only in the instance a child is alive following an abortion attempt. This goes beyond the debate of if a child in the womb is alive or not. The child is already outside of the womb, already breathing, already beginning to become acclimated to the new environment around them. In every sense, the child is definitively alive and our Senate has decided that these individuals do not deserve legislation that explicitly protects their existence.

If anything, this was a compromise presented by Republicans. They had no intentions of changing anything about the abortion industry with this bill. They had no intentions of restricting abortion occurring in America. They wanted to ensure that the 2002 act would be extended to those who survived abortion, all while allowing pro-abortion individuals to continue having abortions, as long as they are successful. The mother had already decided that the child will not be born, so it was a logical conclusion that, under the 2002 act, the child could be deemed “unborn” and then murdered.

That practice is exactly what the Senate just allowed to happen.

This is an endorsement of murdering an individual that you do not want around any longer. Imagine mother who planned on aborting hearing her child crying out, gasping for air. All the while, the mother still decides that she, for whatever reason, does not want her child. She can allow the physician to lay her newly-born child on a table and die. This is the playing-out of the fear the pro-life had held since hearing these sentiments in comments from Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam.

This nightmarish image is indicative of the pure selfishness of the situation. I cannot begin to comprehend what kind of person would believe they still have the choice to murder their child after their child is found alive. How could you place your desires so far ahead of another human being that, in that human’s most defenseless moments, you could allow them to be murdered? How could Senators think that allowing this sadistic type of person freedom to murder their child as they please is in any way beneficial?

How could our elected officials, charged with protecting all of those within our country, decide that some of our individuals do not deserve to breathe?

This is an outrage. There is no other way to describe it. There is no other way to react. However, we must continue to fight. If today our legislators will not protect our children, then tomorrow we must fight harder for change. Tomorrow, we must fight even harder for our citizens to no longer be ruthlessly slaughtered.